


Tiger Squadron Next Generation

by BaelPenrose



Category: Original Work, Original science fiction - Fandom, Science Fiction - Fandom, humans are space orcs - Fandom
Genre: Aliens, Earth is Space Australia, HFY, Humans are space orcs, Multi, and we maintain the utter lack of smut from the original, human pack bonding, humans are crazy, humans are space fae, humans baffle aliens, the triumphant return of the space otters, this one is still in progress, tiger squadron sequel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-27
Updated: 2020-09-15
Packaged: 2021-03-01 16:33:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 33
Words: 61,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23880124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BaelPenrose/pseuds/BaelPenrose
Summary: The mysteries of much of the galaxy are probed, and the reconstruction of the galaxy after the Incursion begins. This story takes place between the ending of the original series and it's epilogue, primarily. It follows primarily the two children of Jake and Callie Andala from the original as they explore the galaxy's unknown regions and begin to probe the secrets of a civilization long since lost.
Kudos: 10





	1. Abandoned Stars

Dalafer was bundled up in the full environmental gear as he, along with Tony and Alicia Andala, plus two Galri in (secreted but non-living and never living) suits, began exploring yet another city on yet another tombworld. The dead worlds, or the “Abandoned Stars” region, as it had come to be known, was the wide swathe of the galaxy that the first Kyriion outbreak had wholesale annihilated. Dalafer was treated to the sights of bones and bodies long since gone to rot, proud metal structures abandoned to rust – and strangely enough, inside non perishable plastics, a few ancient recording mechanisms. Dalafer picked them up, using the mobile electromagnetic charging packs to fill it with just enough energy to check the recordings. The language being recorded was in a native language, but then it repeated in another variant – an archaic version of Galick. This had been one of the worlds that knew the contagion had come from the stars.

“The contagion – it calls itself Kyriion. The death that came to us from the stars makes it known that it means something in the language of its first victims – the birds who brought the death. They hadn’t meant to, we know this now. But as I watch my child – my child writhe and buck against the pain of the contortions, hear the screaming of voices only I can hear as I try to utter reassurances – I feel only hate, and wish they had perished on their own world without fleeing and bringing this doom on ours.”

Dalafer winced, remembering the death of his nephew, similarly writhing in pain. It wasn’t the worst thing he’d seen between the Abandoned Stars, though. The myriad ways of myriad peoples reacting to their worlds and cultures ending to be consigned to oblivion…it was enough to make him relieved about his own decision to go to Blorgi and get the history of his people published so that the traditions and stories of the Banni would not die with him. And it had allowed him to fund museums to the Lost Peoples, allowing the galaxy to bear witness to what it had lost and the memories of those who had been lost.

***

Alicia was reeling. One of the recent surveys in this area had been of a planet that had clearly been glassed from orbit, eradicating all life on it with ruthless efficiency, the atmosphere itself set ablaze by whatever had attacked it, the planet irradiated to a point where absolutely nothing had survived. At the tie, she’d thought it was some heinous war crime or perhaps the result of a disastrous failure of technology that had set off a chain of nuclear fission and fusion. But she had entered what appeared to be a massive government building on this lifeless ball. A quick glance showed her that there were a few recordings – not only in the local tongue, but in an archaic Galick dialect that was pretty common in this region – this had been a species in the galactic community when Kyriion had started its genocidal rampage some three thousand years ago. The first was an archival statement.

“In order that life may be preserved on my own world, regardless of Galactic Charter, I hereby fufill the horrible charge that rulership of a world has placed upon me. I hereby order the annihilation of the Yemok’s homeworld, for it is overrun by the Doom. I hereby sign the death warrant of an entire planet, consigning a billion souls, their memories, hopes and dreams, to oblivion that billions more may survive. May the gods forgive this, for we had no choice, and may they be protected and held, that they do not suffer.” The long dead planetary lord’s voice broke as they spoke, and Alicia recoiled with disgust – it sounded far too much like the quotes from assorted Esharioc invaders her parents had shown her when they had been telling her about the horrors of the Incursion. For all that they eventually had come to befriend the Vulpexi, Endirmas Blorgi, their visceral distrust of the Esharelia was something they’d had a hard time keeping hidden. She kept listening. The Yemok, that was what the inhabitants of that marbleworld had been called. That had been worth learning.

She found another recording. A different voice. “It didn’t save us. The horror I talked my predecessor into…it didn’t save us. The devastation we wrought on the Yemok…the Doom came to us regardless. The Ivari told us its name meant end of the cycle, and gods help us, I think it is. I think this virus will do what pollution, war, and thousands of other sins and failures of our kind failed to. I think it will end the cycle of our existence – possibly the entire galaxy. I have no idea how we can…I know this much. I know I have it, and I know that my mate and child remain clean. I’m not going home to them, not like this. Don’t bother cleaning the blood. Just tell the janitor to blast it away with a flamer and burn this monster out.”

Alicia heard the individual loading some sort of a weapon and then heard a shot, then a long silence. How many times, she wondered. How many times had beings from this doomed part of the galaxy responded to the knowledge that they were likely doomed because they didn’t have the immune system her mother had with suicide to spare their loved ones? In obviously failed attempts, no less?

Ask Dalafer. She forced that particularly grim thought out of her head and kept moving. The planet was dead, but there were a few datakeys here and there that she picked up, intending on having them translated as part of Dalafer’s pet project to ensure that the memories of Kyriion’s victims would have someone to bear witness. In retrospect. It was amazing her mother had survived an infection with this when literal trillions had not.

“That’s what makes humans so special though.” She could almost hear the way her mom finished that story. “Even with an omnicidal maniac genius of a virus, humanity can’t give up. Not in our spirits, not even in our cells. We’re the toughest things the universe has to offer, and as long as we are bound in love, there’s nothing in the galaxy that can stop us.”

The memory brought a smile to her face. Callie and Jake Andala, founders of Tiger Squadron, twice winners of the Blazing Star, ace pilots in every major conflict the Terran Republic had ever fought, members of the Malida clan of the Nathians. They were still around, and couldn’t have been prouder of her and Tony when they’d graduated the fleet academy.

***

Tony sighed as yet another home bore silent witness to the tragedy of Kyriion. The worst part of it was that in this home, while all bones had the damage from the Kyriion, but what had killed them was clearly the weapon, with over a thousand years of corrosion, in the hands of the largest member of this particular family unit. A mercy kill of four beings which had loved the killer, to avoid the horror of Kyriion. He keyed the comms and ran out of the house before he began crying at the sight. His family had come so close to being just another like that, had his mother been spaced when she was infected. So many lives ended like that all because of one simple, nightmarish being that had committed a genocide unrivalled by anything else, ever. Even the Incursion hadn’t come close. Trillions gone. And the galaxy, regardless of Dalafer and Endirmas Blorgi’s best efforts, would never know their names, dreams, stories, histories, because of a single being that had killed them all for no reason beyond that it could. And more and more, in more and more of the records, it was clear that Kyriion hadn’t just acted in accordance with its own nature – and batshit insanity – it had definitely taken pleasure in experimenting, attempting to terrify or taunt the beings it had infected.

And now it was contained, but it was always only one madman or one compromised suit away from coming back. And doing the whole horrid thing over again.

Still, the strange beacon had been picked up on the planet, and he and Alicia’s suit beacons, along with the Galri’s and the Tyrisian who’d been brought along in case heavy lifting was needed, were closing on it. As they approached, he retransmitted the signal to Ritia on the ship, who in turn retransmitted it to the Hegemony.

***

A quick scan of records brought up nothing like that beacon recently…but the Terran Republic representative laughed a little when they looked at the message. “We have a more complete understanding of this now. We intercepted part of this, centuries ago. We only translated as far as “We’re sorry.” The rest of the message is…apparently about how a few of their own ships left their planet during the plague – and that they’d realized some of those were infected. That was probably a cycle that repeated a lot during the chaos of the outbreak.”

***

Tony and Alicia were in the decontamination shower after the airlock had blasted all traces of external matter off their suits, and they’d just slid back into their jumpsuits by the time Ritia informed them of something that brought them great relief.

“Dalafer and the Witness of Memory took off for the core to meet with Endirmas. We’ve been ordered to head for the Uncontacted Sectors, and begin exploring. The first planet we’re stopping on is supposedly pretty lush – a planet called Catlatan.”

That sounded like a break after this nightmare. And no matter how insane the life on that planet might be, it was certainly nothing humans couldn’t handle.


	2. Chapter 2: Catlatan Caper

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The reference from the epilogue is explained.

Catlatan III was a lush world that, from orbit, had looked idyllic. Tropical, beautiful, lush, green, and surface scans showed absolutely beautiful flowers of thousands of colors. Ywyn had done a low flight, and she hadn’t been able to see much past the canopy but she’d said it looked wonderful.

As Alicia Andala was coming to realize, what looked beautiful from the cockpit of someone like Ywyn looked like a primordial nightmare once you were on the ground. Especially with higher than standard gravity, dense atmosphere, loads of humidity and the goddamn environmental breath packs being insanely fucking heavy. The atmosphere was breathable, technically, but going too long without using your breath packs was going to do weird things to your metabolism.

It was also, fun fact for those who thought that the above would make it a fun adrenaline vacation world, full of wildlife that wanted to kill you. Some of which Alicia was rapidly coming to think was probably a bit much even for humans.

Such as the giant toad covered in strange ridges of bone and what looked like horn behind her. That she’d already learned from watching the effects of its blood on the ground when it had grazed some sharp rocks, was corrosive. “TONY WHERE THE FUCK DID WE LEAVE THE LAND SPEEDERS!?”

“WE LEFT THEM ON THE SHIP!”

They kept running, the heavy atmospheric breathpacks weighing them down as they attempted to flee from the oversized toad flopping malevolently after them. “Fuck it. We’ve still got those microfilaments, right?”

“Yeah, but…”

“Great. That giant tree ahead, we’re going to use the grapples to get up there. Hopefully there’s nothing worse up there.”

Alica’s hand slipped as she fumbled to get the grapple out and fire it into the knotted branches of the massive trees of this planet, and when it took she fired the drawing-in mechanism to get her up into the canopy as Tony did the same next to her. The toad slammed against the trees, spattering more steaming blood onto the ground, but stalked off. Alicia sighed with relief until Tony cursed. “Sis. Don’t look now. But I think there was in fact, something worse up here.”

Alicia turned, slowly, and saw a massive bulge in one of the branches only a few meters away, writhing with strange insectoid creatures, the size of a human hand. And looking far too close to winged scorpions for comfort. She quietly signaled Tony that they should start edging away from the hive as the insects hummed. They carefully, hearts pounding, sidled along the massive, slick branches – only to have a series of vines wrap around their wrists and start hauling them towards an opening in the trunk of the titanic tree. “Oh for fuck’s sake these are predatory? Fuck this, fuck this…” the vines weren’t slowing down and she ripped the short, heavy knife from her belt and began hacking away at the vines, first crippling them, then breaking them so that she and Tony could crawl away. The tree started vibrating and the wasp things started boiling out of their nest and beginning to swarm towards them. They slammed the grappling hooks back into the branch and jumped, the friction lines just barely managing to slow them down enough to bring them to a safe halt. They didn’t bother disconnecting the friction lines – merely slashed them with the vibroblades, those wasps were getting closer, and began sprinting into the woods, those heavy breathpacks weighing them down harshly, straps digging into their shoulders.

“Ritia, we’re headed to the clearing, follow our beacon. We’re getting the fuck off this planet. Fuck this place. Catalan is NOT going to be a place people can habitate. Everything we’ve run into is hostile.” The branches ripped at their masks, the brutal humidity drawing out moisture even as yet another one of those giant howling toads flopped into the path in front of them and began lashing out with it’s tongue.

They tried to run around but it just kept flopping after them, and Tony’s heavy breath-pack caught on a brutal tangle of roots as they attempted to duck. As the massive beast flopped closer, skin scraping those ravenous trees and ripping bark along with its own flesh, Alicia sprinted over to her brother, scrambling with her knife, heart pounding in her chest as she hooked her breathpack to his mask and slashed the hoses on his, pulling him to his feet and beginning to limp away as they pulled the heavy Lancer pistols that the Exploratory corps was issued, firing at the breathpack. It failed to explode as she’d hoped – mix of gasses in the atmosphere must be wrong – but it vented enough oxygen that the toad began reeling, chunks of flesh sloughing away, and the trees around it began drooping. “Great, we can do that one more time before we have to take the atmosphere problems of this system on our lungs. Keep moving.” They bolted back towards the landing zone until the ship touched down, and raced aboard it, sealing the airlock as hard as they could.

“Thoughts?”

Their calm pilot’s snarky demeanor annoyed Alicia. “Almost died. Repeatedly. And not in ways that would make being on that planet manageable with careful colonists. It’s a deathworld that humans can’t live on. That, and no attempt at atmospheric terraforming for a nitrogen-oxygen-hydrogen atmosphere is going to have anything less than catastrophic impacts on the local ecosystem, apparently. That planet might have tried to kill us, but let’s not fucking pay the favor back.” She leaned against the bulkhead. “Get me off this psychopathic jungle ball.”

Ritia sounded the affirmative, then noted, with some amusement in her voice. “Oh, look at that. Got some leave in a few days. You guys can do what you want, if you want to go back to Tildas, but I want to spend some time in the Core Sector. The Western Rim is a bit much…”

Tony chuckled a bit, having finally gotten his breath back. “Heh, better the Western Rim than the Abandoned Stars.”

“Anything beats a thousand dead worlds where even the slightest suit malfunction means months in quarantine. And a very probable death.”

Alicia sighed, remembering the grim nightmare of Vaelis II, and sighing. “Not really. We managed that part. But there were a lot of things that spoke an older dialect of Galick there, and we found some of their final recordings. I didn’t…I don’t ever want to hear the desperation of an alien kid dying of dehydration because they can’t go outside, or a parent mercy killing their kid so that they don’t have to suffer from a sapient plague, or someone begging some monstrous sapience of a virus for a mercy for their loved ones it isn’t going to grant. That, and the bodies that told their own awful stories. Dalafer can fund it all he wants, I don’t want to ever go near the Abandoned Stars again.”

Ritia nodded, somberly. “Right. Sorry I asked.” She was silent for a moment. “You guys going to be going back to Tildas for the leave?”

The young Andalas shook their heads. “No. No. Love the family, but we enlisted to see the galaxy. Feel free to show us the Core.”

Ritia grinned. “You got it. Let’s punch it.” The Ivari’s feathers ruffled in amusement as she punched in the coordinates for the Varian system, one of the shadier, and more enjoyable, parts of the Core for people on leave. The warp engines powered up as everyone strapped fully in, and the engines roared as the ship snapped forward out of real space.


	3. Lights of the Core

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rave on an Urbworld

The music was pumping loudly in the clubs of Varian. Alicia didn’t know if the place she was in was particularly notorious for that or if it was just how partying in clubs worked in the Core. It was loud, obnoxious, the air reeked of alcohol, inhalants, and more than a few people she saw were snorting Spice – not the “oh spicy” type but the _Dune_ “spice must flow” type, as it had been explained to her when she had asked why that drug’s name was always translated into Terran Bas as “spice.”

She loved it. It wasn’t the loving peace of the gentle Tildas II, but it was no less alive, and in a totally different way. Maybe at my age, Mom and Dad only ever felt alive in the cockpit, going fast and showing off, she thought. But me? A ship is just a way to get around, just like ground or atmocraft. This? New cultures on the surface of a world your boots haven’t hit before? This was it for me. This was what I wanted to do.

A Tenebrac approached and offered a bit of spice, which I waved away. There were a few Galri who had apparently learned to deal with the machinery here and created some disturbing looking mollusk that emitted a number of aural frequencies – which only served to add a feeling of what was, ironically, synthetic notes to the music that they felt rattling in their bones. A few Palnt were passing around little machines that were apparently used for a bit of neuroelectric stimuli – to withdraw from the body at the end of a paid for hour. Tony was off dancing with a Galri – one who, based on the contortions, had altered their own joint and muscle formations.

A few Hegemony guard troopers were in the bar, and were probably supposed to be checking the place out, or maybe they had and found nothing wrong. In either case, one of them, a normal human, short woman, was looking at Alicia. She had the rank insignia of a major, which was pretty impressive. And on her left shoulder was the badge of the twin turreted castle, the symbol of Sanctum Guard – the ones who’d held Bastion during the Incursion.

Alicia recognized the woman from old newsreels. Then-lieutenant Joan Bonhauer, one of the first members of Sanctum Guard. She’d managed to survive, and had first seen action in the tail end of the Marauder war. There was an incredible degree of respect there – she’d seen the last battle of Wolf Division, and had been part of the force that had held Bastion so incredibly. What was the quote? At Bastion, the planet broke before the Guard did. She didn’t look at Alicia, but sat down, glancing slowly over at Tony.

Alicia was hoping not to be recognized, herself. Her parents might well be wonderful, but there was a lot of celebrity associated with being the sole survivors of the original Horizons, and the first known instance of cross-species adoption, and the first known fighters to get confirmed kills on dreadnaughts, and the first…a lot of things. And being their kid came with the shadow of all of that, people constantly asking you about your parents or introducing you as “is that the daughter of Jake and Callie Andala?” Which after a certain point, began to rankle. She’d chalked up two sapient alien species contacted, been part of dozens of expeditions, evaded death about as often as her parents had at this age. She was ready to be recognized in her own right. And on that topic, she took an angry swig of the alcohol they served to humans at this bar.

The night spiraled on, and she noticed more than a few of the other patrons being pretty impressed at her drinking, then again, based on what she was pretty sure they were murmuring, she was pretty sure at least some of them were still disturbed by the hardiness of the human liver – and Alicia wasn’t about to admit that compared to at least some of the people she’d met, she was a lightweight.

Tony was over in the corner, and seemed to be locked in a fairly impressive effort to lose his entire paycheck in a three slice game with a few members of Terraforming Corps, and a Tyrsian security guard for the Free Economic Zones. I walked over to see how badly my brother was doing, took a good look at his hand, and realized he was fucked. Then again, Tony had always been the better liar of the two of us, so maybe if they didn’t know his tells, he’d be fine. He managed to bluff and say he had a clean sweep – not the best hand, but good enough that it wouldn’t force him to fold, either.

I tapped him on the shoulder to let him know I’d be stepping out and that we could meet back up at the hotel later in the evening. I had some more money, and I figured on going to find a decent movie to see while I was in one of these glittering urbworlds, maybe somewhere a little classier to eat as well.

Wandering around, I saw a massive Dembra working on one of the buildings, lumbering around and using equipment I’d have struggled to lift. I saw a group of Nathians and Epomi wandering around – the Epomi were an annoying nervous people, but they seemed comfortable around Nathians. A Vulpexi was flopping a little onto one of the benches for longer-bodied creatures and reading from a datapad. There was a pit where a group of mercenaries and soldiers were brawling. I saw a few tattoos on them – Guard, a handful of older men who had the tatts that signified surviving members of Wolf Division, a few Keldebrair…it wasn’t a serious fight, just a bunch of warriors trying to show off. They’d all taken off non-essential clothing and begun fighting hand to hand. While I watched, a human got a Keld with a Judo throw and then got pounced on and pinned rapidly, before the Keld was hauled off by a Tyrisian, who was then choked by another human.

I wandered over to a theater and bought a few tickets. I considered seeing Son of the Lost Clan, but frankly I knew Dalafer – he spent a lot of time with Auntie Namna, and I was just a little too irritated at him for making me wander on dead worlds. Sorry, Dal, love you, but I’ve seen enough depressing shit for a while. Into the Hive? I mean, I’d heard enough Keld, Ivari, and Vulpexi point out that that entire series was nonsense, given that it was about the Swarm War, which had happened about the same time Terra had had its industrial revolution, when the Keld and the Vulpexi had worked together to contain the Kilick Hive, until the Vulpexi had figured out how to contain them. Then the two had fought each other to a standstill, back under Dominion rule, before everyone decided to tone down and back off from the fight, but when the Terran Republic had started fighting the Vulpexi, they’d kept many of their best troops away from us, worried about the Keldebriar pouncing on them from the other direction. None of this was covered in the film, which was a heroic romp through nightmarish fights against the Kilicks, and one that left me feeling like I was having fun. Next I saw a slice of life about an Epomi family on an agriworld, trying to make things work after a series of flares had damaged the solar generator systems on the planet. For all it was fun to watch the action of the martial races of the Hegemony, it was also fascinating to watch the lives and mindsets of beings who’d evolved as prey, not predators.

When the film ended, I sat down at a restaurant and bought myself a decent meal, which was a relief from issue food. I listened in on a few conversations, one by an Ivari who was excited about the idea of their original homeworld being rediscovered, maybe terraformed back into something liveable, and I was tempted to laugh – the other worlds that had been obliterated by Kyriion had no chance of being terraformed. Fixing it would lead to too many risks of a resurgence of that psychopathic organism and absolutely NO ONE would ever be willing to risk that. Besides, I wasn’t sure how big a deal it was to be on your species homeworld, especially one you’d never seen. Neither Tony nor I had ever set foot on Terra, and I’d only been in the Humana sector in general once or twice. I heard from some older humans that I should see Terra before I died, but honestly I was just as happy – by all reports from alien friends I’d made, it was pretty mental in terms of where things were built. Maybe I should see the ancestral homeworld, but you know what, I could find batshit insane worlds anywhere – just look at Catlatan.

A Tenebrae slithered over and asked if they could share my table. I let them do so, and it wasn’t long before an Eshrelia offered to join as well. I wasn’t really comfortable around the xenomorphs – my parents had eventually overcome their issues with Vulpexi, but their issues with the Eshrelia never quite went away. I was working to overcome some of that prejudice, now that Nex’arra was fixing their society and pushing their outlook into a healthier direction. “Exploratory Corps?” I nodded.

The Tenebrae was apparently in the same service I was, though the Eshraelia was actually with one of the groups that worked setting up terraforming gear on dead worlds to purge any surviving Kyriion before effort was made to make those planets genuinely liveable again. Eshraelia had the advantage of being immune to Kyriion, and many of their colonies were on dead worlds whose artifacts had been recovered, their memories recorded. The galaxy as a whole still struggled to trust them. I was actually pretty fascinated by the terraforming groups, since my family had pretty much been all about exploration or combat, so far. They were talking about some project that they had where they could set up specific beacons that sent out pulses similar to their old purging lances, but much wider range. It took months to get them all set up right, but once you did it, you went back into orbit, then fired them off at regular intervals for a standard month, and viola, all Kyriion particles purged. Theoretically a standard week was sufficient but with Kyriion…no one was satisfied with “theoretically.”

I chatted with them for a little bit before standing up and enjoying the music playing from the club as I wandered back to the hotel. The Core sector was pretty sweet for a party, but I was kinda…already seeing why these urbworlds weren’t my parents’ favorite. I was having fun though. I checked my datapad as I got ready for bed. Our next deployment was apparently some tombworld recently found – scans indicated extinction from well before Kyriion, and evidence of someone incredibly advanced having lived there.


	4. Ghost Ship

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Crawling around an ancient ship with no life on it is a good idea, right?

The soldiers aboard the Sundering Shadow were checking their gear. Both Railguns and plasma weapons were considered too risky aboard ships, and no one wanted to go in with only a ripper SMG, and with that in mind, the new Baneslayer carbine had been invented. A standard action weapon with a self-contained reaction propellant, firing light armor piercing rounds with mass operated explosives inside. Similar to the Ripper SMG, but with heavier ordinance, and a non-collapsible stock designed to be carried as a primary weapon by mainline infantry in environments where plasma rifles or railguns would be ill-advised. The vibrosabers, Lancer pistols, and hand flamers were also comforting. A small unit of Dembra and Palnt engineers was standing by, along with some Ivari and Vulpexi linguists. The Galri had looked at the machinery on that ship and opted out.

Harriet Stilson, Joan Bonhauer, a Keld named Tilior i’Mas, Andionx of the Tyrisians, and over a hundred other soldiers were aboard the Sundering Shadow, preparing to board the mysterious hulk to check it out. There were negative lifesigns on the ship, but as the Sythor had taught them, that didn’t mean something was necessarily safe. That, and the ship was still moving on a trajectory that indicated there was some power in it. The soldiers were mostly boarding as a matter of caution. If there was anything aboard that might be a threat, they needed to deal with it before Exploration Corps boots touched the ground on Garvalax III.

The Sundering Shadow pulled next to the massive ship, under careful guard of the naval detachment that would intervene if the ancient hulk fired on the troop transport. The troopers donned their helms and boarded the dead ship, with Joan taking point, carefully checking the corners and keeping the unit together as they swept the ship. Joan was checking the scanners. “Still no life signs. According to the gear we have though, there’s some weird readings…hey, Science crew, you getting these?”

“Dark matter reaction systems. Way beyond our current technology. Don’t mess with it. Compromising that system might create a black hole.”

“10-4. What else can you tell me?”

“Temporal distortion, though that’s unsurprising given the nature of the reactor. Be careful. I’m not sure what you’ll find in there.” The ship was empty, and the empty corridors of the ship seemed to taunt with how alive they seemed in their dull red paint, despite that Maj. Bonhauer knew full well that it wasn’t blood – and that actually, from a pathogenic standpoint, this ship was probably cleaner than almost anything in the galaxy. Life scans totally negative. Not even a virus on this ship. Some organic remains in a very few places, but even those were deader than dead, with nothing microbial growing on them. That alone had frightened the Galri enough to stay away.

Still, for all that she knew the ship was perfectly sterile, and hell, even with the red it looked perfectly sterile, but it felt like the massive, ancient hulk was alive and watching hungrily as the little company of soldiers wandered around its belly, all their formations and careful sweeps meaning little.

The scanner lit up. “We have some signals. Let’s move towards them and secure the area. Go slow and careful, don’t get lost. And remember what the Synthor taught all our peoples: “No life signs” and “no hostiles” are not the same thing. Keep alert, and keep careful.”

Andonix nodded, the grizzled Tyrisian commander looking just as nervous as the human major. The ship’s winding corridors definitely had something strange going on in them. The comms were crackling a little more with static from the Sundered Shadow, but they were still coming through clearly. “Delta team, you’re going to have to clarify what just happened. Your headcams indicate you turned right in that corridor, but location-tracking indicates that that you went left. Confirm vector change, over.”

“We did turn right. Our location tracking indicates we turned right. Do your trackers really say we were turning left, over.” Harriet was nervous, and didn’t care for the indication of that particular communication. 

“The ship is distorting our location accuracy for them. This ship isn’t quite right.”

“Negative, Delta team. Bravo, report.”

The voice of Tilior came through clearly. “Negative, overwatch. Something going on here is definitely unnatural. And I cannot shake the feeling that we’re being watched.”

“There is no indication of any life or even any sensory transmission aboard the ship aside from your own signals and what is clearly an automated, and looping one that Alpha is heading towards.”

The easy voice of a Tenebrae oozed across the comms. “Does not have to be. Whatever it is may not be observing through means we cannot detect. It has been millennia since Vulpexi needed to rely on with instinct, but I warn you – don’t discount it.”

“Will take that under advisement, Bravo.”

Alpha team, led by Harriet Stilson, rang the comms as well. “What looks like crew quarters secured. Data pads being captured now, onboard data uploaded to the computers in the linguist bay on the transport ship. If you can figure out how to translate what they were saying, we might have a better idea of what happened here.”

“10-4, Alpha, beginning decryption protocols now. Will respond when we figure it out.”

Joan was still moving towards the room that supposedly had the transmission coming, along with another thirty troopers of varying species, including Eshrelia – one of them a former Crusader. They were contacted back quickly by the ship.

“Boarding team, come in. Come in boarding team.”

“Sundering, we read you. We’ve only been out of contact for a few minutes.”

“You’ve been out of contact for almost five standard hours.” Joan swayed at that and held up a hand to the troopers around her. That seemed completely impossible. They’d only been moving for a few minutes. The voice at the other side of the comms sounded extremely unsettled. “We have a rudimentary lexicon thanks to the data that Alpha team recovered. Some of it seems apocryphal, some of it seems more specific. There’s a lot of information concerning something known as the “Uncalled,” and some strange phrase, repeated in the looping transmission. “What will be was, what was will be.” What that means, we aren’t certain, but if you only experienced a few minutes where we experienced a few hours, you need to get off that…”

The science ship interrupted on the Comms. “Changed sweeps on a hunch given what we do know about dark matter. There are moving mass shadows almost everywhere in that ship, ones you aren’t going to be able to detect. And there’s a much bigger one about to generate. Fall back immediate –“  
The comms crackled again. “This is Charlie Platoon, engaged by – something. Nichols just vanished. We’re withdrawing as fast as we – fuck!” A different voice, this one younger and more nervous – “Did you see that? The LT just vanished! Fucking….fire into the area he disappeared! Firing retreat, I’ll hold sterngau-“ Rattling fire of the Baneslayer carbines, the distinctive crackle of the charging blade of a vibrosaber as someone tried to engage. Screams, shots and a few other blasts rang out. Joan began ordering her troopers to retreat back to the Sundered Shadow. They did so, even as the command aboard the ship informed them over the comms, solemnly, that contact had been completely lost with Charlie platoon.

“This shouldn’t be possible – they come through the readings like a mass shadow in hyperspace, they shouldn’t even be able to impact anything in real space. – FUCK FUCK, Alpha, there’s one right in front of you – meter from the Crusader – “ The Eshrelia supersoldier brought their massive gravity hammer around full circle, and gave a shout of joy when it seemed to have impacted something, only to curl inward, on themselves, as their exoskeleton cracked and blood began pouring from their eyes and jaws. In a moment, the folding body had folded further, seeming to implode. Joan fired into the area around it, the shots passing clean through, bursting harmlessly against the bulkhead as the Eshrelia giant died and the rest of the team kept retreating. Her body suddenly felt heavier, but she forced herself to keep moving. Alpha team were screaming as well, clearly engaged by something and pulling back rapidly. More of them were moving, and for just a moment, out of the corner of her eye, she thought she could see the forms of something grey and purple racing alongside her, but when she turned her head to see if it was a Tenebrae or similar, there was nothing there. The next time she saw something moving she opened fire, only to have absolutely nothing occur.

The small boarding team was sprinting now, back to the Sundered Shadow, panicking, not retreating like soldiers – against any normal enemy, known or unknown species, the soldiers of the Hegemony could stand and have a chance of winning, but against whatever the hell was going on here – time dialation, invisible and possibly intangible enemies with some ability to warp gravity, and the strange, winding corridors of this strange ghost ship that had seemed ready to devour a meal the moment they stepped on board, no discipline would have remained unbroken. It was time to retreat, fully.

Comms broke in and out as they sprinted. “Delta confirmed away. Alpha…contact lost with Alpha.”  
Bravo team was still fleeing, unsure which way to turn or which way to go. Joan was still running, and she saw another one of her troopers abruptly implode, quickly pausing to put a baneslayer round through their head so they didn’t have to suffer. Whatever it was that was killing them, it had a sense of sport to it, and it was about twenty minutes before she realized she’d been turned around.

Follow your instinct. The comms from the ship aren’t working for location tracking. Harriet Stilson was better, already moving, and Joan let her lead the way, even as a few more of their troopers – a Keld, two humans, a Tyrisian – were picked off. As they passed yet another turn a tentacle whipped out and seized her and she almost slashed at it before she realized it was a Tenebrae limb, and that the being it was attached to was frantically waving to pull her towards the ship. The small unit fled the rest of the way, finally getting aboard the Sundered Shadow even as Andionx had to vault out of the ship and throw the last few individuals, now stumbling direly, aboard.

Joan’s head swam….how could well trained troops be stumbling with exhaustion, even as Andionx jumped aboard and the ship ripped away from the hulk, accounting that over half the personnel of the company had been lost.

The medics looked them over. Severe dehydration. Exhaustion, sleep deprivation. “What do you mean, it was only four hours for us.”

“You were on that hulk for two days. You need fluids, and you need rest. Lie down, Major.” Joan slowly did so, closing her eyes to the batshit operation that had just occurred.

***

The renegade strike cruiser, Ghost of Sparta, trained its illegally modified censor suite on the massive hulk, the one they’d nicknamed the Titan of Carrion on their last encounter with it. It was a terrible memory, and when the military ships had begun approaching, the captain quietly speculated to himself. “There’s no way even the military would be stupid enough to board one of those hulks, is there?”

When the military actually did so, the two mute Nathians who they’d adopted long ago watched with silent horror, and as the pilot turned the ship away the captain shook his head. “Brave fucking idiots. No sane spacer would go near those.”

***

“What will be was, what was will be.” Ceris shook his head as he thought about what that might have meant. Even as the other linguists he worked with stared at the transcription – “What is all this shit about the One in Waiting, or any of….the Uncalled come from beyond reality. They are not real, and yet they can harm. They do not live, and yet they can die. They cannot be seen, nor heard, and yet they can be felt, however briefly. When they arrive, one does not fight – nor flee. Gravity and time itself will conspire with the enemy to slow you down. There is nothing valued in contact with the Uncalled, nothing to be learned, other than the price of meddling with the fundament of the universe. We have suffered through cycles of them – to survive to await the renewal is all that one may hope. We have seeded the galaxy with further life – among it, living weapons that yearn for blood, and whose quantum resonance allows them to fight the ones from beyond. When the Uncalled arrive unto infinity, do not seek to fight – nor flee – make peace with your gods and your future, for you will earn the right to attempt the past anew, when the One in Waiting takes pity.”

What the fuck did that mean? The Uncalled seemed to match, in a cryptic way, the things that had been encountered aboard that ship – but what was the One in Waiting? What did it mean, renew the cycle? What did it mean – living weapons to fight the ones from beyond? What was any of this? Were the Uncalled truly returning, or was it just that dead civilization that needed to beware of them?

Questions that needed answering. The Exploratory corps was going to Garvalax, and maybe that would allow them to find something they could use, or some evidence either way. But they needed to be warned of the risks. Of whatever those things were.


	5. Euphemisms

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some light humor

Alicia was frustrated – the orders had come down that Gravalax was not to be explored after all. She didn’t have much information, but her contacts in the military were saying that whatever had happened there, it had been bad and everything was still extremely classified. Instead she and Tony were to be sent out to a feudal world – she always hated Contact duty with species that weren’t advanced enough to be part of the Hegemony. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand the reasoning – it had been explained to her often and at length, using examples from her own species’ history and galactic history at large, times that people with the technology to tip the balance in another culture’s struggles had done so, sometimes with good intentions, sometimes with self-serving ones, and almost always made things worse.

That didn’t make it easier to see villagers of some world still mostly in its medieval era struggling with hunger or sickness they could help, knowing that any interference at that stage in development would horribly damage the species and their planet as a whole. In fact, they weren’t even permitted to make contact with the locals – just to keep an eye on conditions on that planet, see how far along development was, assess a bit of the local culture, environmental conditions, et cetera, while remaining hidden so as to avoid the locals detecting them. As well as setting up some listening equipment to hear the local language coupled with visuals, in hopes that the linguists would be able to generate and keep updated an acceptable lexicon for translation if and when contact was actually made.

The team that went down with us wasn’t big – Ywyn, formerly of Tiger Squadron, now looking for things to do in peacetime and with the disbanding of the legendary unit was piloting the ship, Ritia having once again gone back to the private sector where she was happier – discipline had never been that one’s strong suit. Another Vulpexi of the Blorgi line, this one named Illias, was there to work with the linguistics. Among humans, Alicia, Tony, a Tenebrae named Paenirc who was even better at not being noticed than the average member of her species, and a Keld named Taldir e’Klae, from the same original clan as the current Emperor, commanding the expedition. This was the group who would be going in on foot to scout out, along with a few Nathians – one from the Malida clan that the Andalas had been adopted into, a few from the Nilpi. It had been determined that Eshrelia were not permitted on these missions, as they, like the Dembra or Tyrsians, tended to be of sufficient mass to struggle to remain hidden, as well as be the most easily tracked if the soil was anything other than incredibly dense. There was a Galri biologist with them, Iolin, a male who who’s job was to take soil and local lifeform samples to examine, synthesize, and determine if there were any dangerous pathogenic material within it. There were two techs – one human, Jessie Jaegar, who Alicia had worked with on a previous deployment. The older woman was incredibly valuable for advice, being the child of another major hero of many of humanity’s wars. The final tech was a middle-aged Palnt involved in setting up and operating the scanning technology and the audio recording equipment, named Njos.

Alicia tried to remember that this was an excellent team as Ywyn, preparing to drop into the atmosphere, swept wide and brought her crashing against her own spine at roughly four times her proper weight. A few of the crew complained about that, Tony among them. “Damnit, Skipper. Just because you got used to flying with Tiger Squadron doesn’t mean we all did.”

“You telling me you didn’t learn how to fly from them too, kid?”

“Not the point, Punkhawk.”

“It is though.” The bright-feathered Ivari’s words were voiced with that choked warbling tone that Ivari voices took when the avian beings were holding back laughter. “And quit bitching – if I can manage it with hollow bones and gravity-atrophied musculature, you properly boned beings can handle it.” Jessie, Alicia, and Tony all struggled not to start laughing, then Ywyn groaned from the cockpit. “Right, right. Forgot how many euphemisms humans have.”

“Euphemisms?” Paenirc’s voice was the same mix of sibilant and clicking as the bulk of his breed, but it was laced with undeniable curiosity. “For what?”

Taldir gave a bark of laughter. “Mating. Human euphemisms are almost always about mating.”

Alicia, Tony and Jessie began flushing, Jessie more so than the other two, realizing that they were going to suffer far more from those giggles than Ywyn had. Alicia and Tony had grown up among Nathians, must like their parents, meaning that their own embarrassment around the subject was somewhat less. “Why, though?” That was Iolin, voicing the question that would, of course, be asked by a species who had almost no nudity taboo – given the Galri’s own extensive ability to modify themselves and most other life forms given time to work on it, they were apt to seeing their bodies as art to proudly display to one another.

Jessie grunted. “Many of us come from pre-contact cultures that viewed mating as private, as a result, many of us have a certain degree of shame discussing it – shame that translates into humorous deflection when it comes up.”

An Epomi blinked, head turning slightly to bring the human into view of her side-facing eyes. “Violence does not trouble you. I have been near warriors of humanity after battle, and you joke about it. But mating…does? Does mating hurt among humans?” The tone of voice indicated very much that she wouldn’t be surprised if the insane breed had found a way of making mating painful – and still enjoyed it.

“Not…usually?” Jessie’s voice was starting to strangle.

Alicia coughed. “Humans joke about anything that makes them uncomfortable, whether for good reasons – like violence – or stupid ones, like sex. Can we please change the subject, I grew up among Nathians and this is still pretty awkward.”  
The Vulpexi bobbed his eyestalks. “Is this related to the studies I saw about how human mating dynamics do not always match anatomy?”

THAT statement took everyone by surprise. “Wait, what?”

“Some human beings have “genders” different from anatomy, and refer to it as being part of their identity. I know this much. “Gender” is usually denoted in conversation through use of pronouns, and I understand this as well, though according to a class I took some time ago on Terran history, humans for a long time viewed ‘anatomical sex’ and ‘gender’ as the same thing, in addition to viewing the female gender as weaker or less suited to power,” Illias was confused, but speaking very clearly and slowly, as though to make sure he understood it.

Jessie took that one, having, herself, used Galri biosculpting to transition. “I…yes. Sexual organs in humans are fixed, and sometimes “male” and “female” anatomy does not match up to “man” or “woman” or “nonbinary person”. However, I didn’t catch what you said about relationship dynamics – how does that enter this conversation?”

Illias paused. “Sexual organs on humans…are fixed? Static? I understood that. I understood that “male” and “female” pertained to identity, and that humans sometimes changed anatomy to represent gender better. And that “male” anatomy, for much of your history, was associated with sexual action and “female” with sexual passivity. Does the discomfort you feel talking about mating – is it related to having entered new relationships that require re-evaluation of anatomy, as we do, despite only having recently gained the technology do that? Is the awkwardness regarding sex pertaining to a holdover from when you could not?”

There was a long pause, then Jessie burst out laughing. Alicia and Tony weren’t totally sure they got it, but as Jessie wheezed it out, it started making sense.

“Are you,” she gasped “saying that this entire time, you thought human gender was actually just “top, bottom, switch?” That…wait, no you’re saying that Vulpexi change sex in accordance with relationship dynamics like that?”

Illias coughed. “Is that not why you got the Galri to alter your form?”

“NO! That’s not how…wait, are you saying that Brimas Blorgi, Mage of the LENS network, changed sex from male to female because in her new relationship, she was the bottom?”  
“Is that not…”

“No, gender roles aren’t just that. It’s not that it’s…oh my god that is hilarious.” She started laughing madly. Taldir glanced between them, purring like a thunderstorm. Conversations like this, educational as they were, were frequently amusing. When Jessie finally regained her breath she said. “No, that’s not it. Gender among humans isn’t…that.”  
“But male, female, these are genders?”

“Haven’t been for almost a century. “Male” and “Female” are now used to refer to anatomical configurations. “Man, woman, nonbinary” and a few others are “genders.” She glanced at him. “Unlike the Eshrelia, who are unisex and pretty much just use neutral pronouns in Galick.”

“Right, I understand that part, but….that is fascinating.”  
  


“Any other euphemisms we should know about?” Tony and Alicia thought about the things they’d occasionally overheard from their parents and decided never to use any of them in front of any of these people. “Nope, none. Not that we can think of.” 

Then Njos spoke. “So. There is a thing that makes your people uncomfortable to discuss. But you use so many other words that mean other things as euphemisms for it that it becomes hard to speak without discussing the thing that makes you uncomfortable.”

There was a long pause and Ywyn’s voice came from the cockpit. “Humans, right?”

The second wave of laughter took longer than the first to die down.


	6. Feudal World Feud

The little world of Tarvis VI was a back-vacuum ball with a widely temperate climate. The locals didn’t yet know about space, and had only limited metallurgy – the Tarvi were undergoing their iron age. Alicia glowered out the viewport of the stealth ship as they descended, eager to hit dirt, get some observation, and leave back to a world that either had no sapient life or one where she’d be allowed to interact with it. Tony was busy sharpening a vibroblade, despite the fact that the things pretty much shook their own monomolecular edges into perfect alignment whenever you cut something with them. The humor of the previous day’s conversations about gender had more or less faded with the news of events in the Ephailas Sector – a terrorist sect had launched a vicious series of attacks against the Eshrelia in the region, seeking retribution for the events of the war fifteen years prior. The Guard was deploying to find the terrorists and bring them to justice, along with Intelligence. It was a thankfully rare occurrence, but such violence did happen – and it was almost always answered with military force, at least where Terran Republic officials got to make the call – too much ugly history of racially motivated violence in human history to be willing to see that in anything but a deadly serious light.

“So, you guys hear about those pirates?”

“The Ghost of Sparta?” The stolen and illegally modified strike cruiser was notorious for striking at major conglomerates and then fading away to deep space, selling goods on the black market to keep itself and its crew in credits. The Navy had tried, on and off to find them, for years.

“Yeah. Hit another Seracorp freighter right?”

“Yeah. Far as we know, no casualties on either side. Navy’s still pretty pissed.”

“I bet.” The conversation lulled again and Ywyn broke the silence by announcing that they’d arrived. The atmosphere was a breathable mix, though it was a little easier on the Tenebrae than on the others’ aboard, it wasn’t dangerous for any of them. “So we set up these listening devices and concealment fields, stalk the locals for a few days to observe, then take off, right?” Tony had never been on a no-interaction Contact mission before, though Alicia had only been on one. He’d been doing duty fucking around on some feral desert world.

“That’s right. No matter what we see, we do not engage with the locals. Too much risk in screwing up their cultural development as a species if we start fucking with them.” The running gag about pre-Contact Terran conspiracy theories being the basis for an actual policy had died down when a few scholars of galactic history had given the current generation of galactic citizens a pointed reminder of how the Vulpexi Dominion had operated for so long.

“Right, right. I mean, why would we?”

“Last one of these I was on is the reason Aid Corps personnel can’t come on these any more. A plague was going through and the locals didn’t have the medicine to fix it. A lot of them died because we couldn’t help. Though by all accounts, the plague is dying out now.”

“We aren’t allowed to help even then?”

Alicia groaned. “Yeah, I think it’s stupid too. And if it’s Kyriion, we’re supposed to fall back and quarantine the planet.” No one objected to that. In fact, Kyriion protocol ran that if 50% of a planet’s populace was infected, or if all known landmasses had at least 10% infection, the planet was to be sterilized. That had never had to be done before, but the fear was always there.

The ship finally landed and the crew disembarked, beginning to move in the general direction of one of the villages they’d seen. The locals resembled goats, somewhat – strange, six eyed goats with prehensile tails and beards. Images taken from upper atmosphere of them seemed pretty strange – hopefully they would seem a little less strange up close. The ground was pretty dense, meaning that walking would be relatively easy – Alicia still remembered that one planetoid with the very loose dust that gave away beneath her boots with hate.

The trees weren’t as big as the ones on Catlatan, but then, critically, neither were the toads, so it balanced out, even if the atmosphere was much more humid than they’d been led to expect. The Palnt began setting up the first of the relays a few kilometers from the village while the Tenebrae argued with them ferociously about the best place to both set it up to pick up the traces of audio signal – and how finely to tune it towards the village – while it could still be absolutely concealed with what equipment they had so that the locals couldn’t stumble upon space age stealth technology when they had only just figured out how to reliably make quality steel.

Alicia and Tony were busy keeping a lookout – the Epomi and Galri were still pretty close to where the ship had touched down, taking biosamples and checking the soil. There were a few of the locals – Tavri – charging after something small with spears mounted within their horns, guided by their strange limbs. The small thing dove behind a few stones, but instead of burrowing, as Alicia watched and listened, it began screeching in strange, variable patterns. The Tavri started talking back – seemingly replying to the target of the attack. The creature fleeing and hiding was definitely not a Tavri – it was too small, face too angular, more like someone had tried to cross-breed a wallaby with a fox and wound up regretting the result. Still, it had grabbed up a rock and was desperately smashing at the grasping tails and beards of its pursuers, still clearly shrieking.

“What’s going on…what is that little rodent thing?”

“Doesn’t matter, we can’t interfere.”

“No, look.”

Lt. Taldir finally took a look. “That…does not match any of the previous scans of life on this planet. But it’s definitely operating like a sentient being. We…” The smaller being made a quick move and then withdrew away into the trees, coming within inches of the little conclave of the explorers.

“Do you think that was some kind of racial violence, or?”

“It’s…unclear. We should probably be careful.” The small group continued moving, chatting quietly among themselves about what they’d seen.

They managed to set up a few more of the towers, and managing to conceal them quickly and professionally to continue picking up chatter. The overflight of Ywyn’s stealth ship to keep scanning the area happened here and there. The Galri and Epomi were still studying the bioforms, occasionally sending excited messages about evidence of all sorts of interesting soil conditions.

They wandered a little closer to another village, and Tony noted something strange. A weird wall was in the middle of the village, carved from black granite. Something was painted on it – or enameled. Something that shouldn’t have been possible from a people who had never seen the depths of space and the myriad wonders and horrors among the stars. A sucking spiral that was unmistakeably a black hole, with a star nearby, clearly being pulled into it….and from within the hole, they’d depicted something long and twisted, with strange geometry like nothing any of the team had ever seen. Tony shuddered a bit at the sight, and passed the binoculars to Alicia, who had a similar reaction. They recorded the images and then showed them to the Keld, who shrugged, attempting to display ease but failing because of the nervous twitch of tail. “A local religion perhaps…yet it certainly seems like a dark one, if so.” The Keldebriar shook his body, hackles raised. “I wish to depart this world. Finish the mission.”

A few days passed on the little planet while the landed team tried to figure out what they’d seen. Some progress was made on a basic lexicon, and it wasn’t long before said lexicon was transmitted to the translation devices the team had, and it wasn’t long after that before the little team figured that it was time to pull up stakes and depart the planet, figuring that whatever they’d seen was going to remain a mystery, both the eerie mural and the foxlike creature they’d seen being attacked.

Jessie and Paenirc had been perturbed by that, even if Paenirc wasn’t totally sure he felt justified interfering in such actions – the Tenebrae civil wars had led to all manner of awful things some centuries ago, and not all of them unjustified. After all, from what they’d seen, they might have seen two soldiers attacking a persecuted civilian – or two soldiers attacking an infiltrator of the other side in some conflict going on on this planet. That, coupled with the strange imagery had everyone on edge. Taldir was firm. “Regardless of our feelings, discipline is critical. We cannot interfere.” That had quelled the discussion.

They were approaching their ship, which was preparing for takeoff. The linguists when a few more of the fox/wallaby things bounded into the clearing and checked in sudden terror at the ship, graceful though it was it must have been a horror to behold to anything unused to it. They began praying – the lexicon allowed that to be quite clear at least. A group of the Tarvi approached, snorting in rage, when they, too, saw the craft. The Tarvi began howling about dark sorcery to bring down the demons, as expected from a Tharpa, but the little rodentoids began flinching inching away from the ship and the Tarvi, who began snarling that once the strange creatures were exterminated the One would be pleased and they’d have nothing further to fear.

Paenirc prickled slightly, slithering off the tree he’d hidden on at the word “exterminated.” He was of a smaller sect among the Tenebrae- one that had been hunted for sport by others during the scattered peoples’ age of civil wars and violence. The notion that these goat things would have a fox hunt for other sentients clearly enraged him. Alicia half agreed, but she didn’t know what “demons” they were referring to.

“What is going on?” She asked the creatures, praying internally that the lexicon that had been patched to her chip would let her be understood amongst them.

“Old one, our business is not with you. Our cleansing is almost complete – these vermin will not bring about another dark age, even with your strange aid.” Alicia looked at the small fox creatures, who were begging for mercy, one clearly a juvenile with a severe leg wound from the lance the Tarvi were holding.

She reached for her Lancer pistol, and before she’d cleared the holster the Keldebriar officer had ordered her to stand down. She ignored him and continued to draw, and was surprised to see Taldir lunge forward, producing a knife and slashing the Tarvi’s throat, then signaling to Paen to go ahead and strangle the other one. The second goat hunter thrashed as the tentacles constricted on it until it finally dropped, twitching helplessly.

The little fox things began shuddering, and kneeling down. “Is there somewhere safe you can hide?”

Alicia was speaking to them. “Underground sanctum. Away from them, and their god. Not far. Thank you. Thank you.” They shuddered at how close they’d come to death and began moving again, more cautiously. The Keld called after them. “We will be leaving now, and not seen again on your world for many lifetimes. Do not hope for our rescue again.”

Then he turned and smiled darkly at Alicia. “When I tell you to put up a weapon, do it. You are under my command, human. Parentage or no, you’re on my crew. A knife slash will not be questioned. An exploding 12mm to the head would draw questions these things don’t need to be asking yet. Think things through.”

Alicia gaped. “But what about all the stuff about not interfering?”

“I know better than to give an order that won’t be obeyed. You are an Andala – I have friends who served with your parents. There is no way you’d have obeyed me had I said to stay out entirely. And my people don’t care for the attacking of unarmed children either…nor genocide. I merely dealt with it in a way that doesn’t end up creating evidence of protocol violation.” The great cat smiled again. “I am happy we had the same opinion on such rules. You humans are not the only ones who refuse to turn aside those who need help – nor the only ones to fight in their defense.”


	7. Analysis

“The images sent in by the Exploratory Corps are proving interesting – though especially of note are those recovered by Taldir e’Klae’s team. I want to draw your attention to this specific image.”

On the viewscreen flashed the mural that had been discovered on that strange obelisk in the center of the Tarvi village. The assembled analysts and cryptologists grunted at the sight – there was nothing in the shape language of the obelisk itself that did not scream of serious malevolence, but the imagery enameled onto it had been even more disturbing. The strange, eldritch-looking being writhing in the depths of what was clearly a black hole – as one appeared to advanced imaging systems that made them detectable, something a bunch of late iron age beings shouldn’t have had any conception of.

“However, this image is not actually the reason you were called in today. The actual reason is that today we are letting you in on what was discovered aboard the old hulk around Garvalax – the one the pirates and other rogue spacers call the _Titan of Carrion_.”

The wave of frightful murmurs set off by THAT statement was loud and immediate, and it took the jaded Tenebrae running the meeting several minutes to restore order. “Shut up! You’re supposedly professional analysts and you’ve let your nervousness regarding spacer superstition and rumors that have swirled around that operation override discipline. Pay attention.”

Once that had cowed the assembled into silence, he continued. “As I was saying. Hegemonic Guard forces boarded the Titan of Carrion and swept it. They encountered no signs of life, or artificial intelligence – from a biological standpoint, that ship was probably more sterile than deep space. After exploring for some time, a number of soldiers located a series of data keys – ones that were decoded and determined to find a great deal of information on the precursor civilization – as well as whatever it was that brought them down. Palnt technicians recovered schematics of the functioning of the ship as well.”

“However, not long after these discoveries, the scouting team became aware of a temporal anomaly effective aboard the craft. The inserted units experienced a few hours, but those on the naval ship, Sundered Shadow, recorded that the mission had lasted two days. We are issuing a general order that no further interaction is to be had with precursor hulks, including firing on them – only trouble can come of this, and we have no idea what is containing the temporal distortion – or even what is causing the temporal distortion. In addition, the force sent aboard the ship was ambushed by an unknown opponent with unknown weaponry and capabilities. However, the team reports no visible or audible contact with the enemy. The enemy seemed to be detected as mass shadows in hyperspace and whatever weapons they were using were absolutely devastating, as the recon team took sixty two percent casualties in an engagement that they only experienced over the course of an hour. Mind you, these were all seasoned veterans of the Incursion and many served in the Marauder War.”

Dead silence in the room.

“In addition to this disastrous situation, it is noteworthy that we have seen absolutely no evidence of further contact with the enemy – beings we are assuming are referred to as the “Uncalled” as a result of some of the data taken from the ancient ship. In fact, from what little we have been able to determine, it seems doubtful that the creatures will engage us further absent our crossing some sort of line – though what that line is we have no idea, thus the concerns.”

That led to a long pause, before an Epomi finally spoke. “So…terrifying beings beyond even the Hegemonic military’s might to engage and stop exist in hyperspace and drop out of it to devastate beings that violate rules that they refuse to communicate – pardon me but that is absolutely terrifying.”

The Dembra representative spoke as well. “Back to that obelisk though – that isn’t stone – that’s meteoric iron. Whatever’s on there must be pretty important if they’re using something that rare for it.”

The Tenebrae at the head of the meeting room clicked irritably. “As I was saying, that’s not the only problem. The issue is that according to the Precursors, the Uncalled arrived as part of some sort of strange looping phenomena – archeological scans indicate that the Precursor civilization was built up and devastated back to a Bronze age several times over several tens of millennia. Everywhere in the text recovered a singular phrase crops up. “What will be was, what was, will be.” As though there is some acknowledgement of a cycle, and references to the One In Waiting crop up almost as frequently – whether they refer to it as a deity or something else entirely is a subject of serious debate amongst the linguists and historians studying the records we’ve translated. Endirmas Blorgi is once again doing research into history – she seems ecstatic that she’s able to do that again rather than run the Free Economic Zones. However, the most terrifying component of all of this is the one I haven’t spoken yet.”

He gestured at the Dembra. “The obelisk. The text, cross-checked against other texts of theirs and compared against the language of the Tarvi uses the same phrases repeatedly. “What will be was, what was, will be.” There is considerably less ambiguity in how the One in Waiting is mentioned – it absolutely seems to be held as a diety by them, at least. Even more concerning, there is a remarkable degree of similarity between the Tarvi script and that of the Precursor we discovered.”

That brought the meeting room to their feet in a hurry before an Ivari managed to assert control and shout for imaging of both scripts – and realized, rather unhappily, that this had not been the wisest idea if the goal was to gain control of the situation, because the scripts were undeniably similar to her linguists’ eye. In fact, the Tarvi script was almost certainly derived from the Precursor – meaning that those religious zealots had been interfered with on some level, or perhaps discovered artifacts of the Precursor, crashed on their planet long before they’d evolved sapience.”

There was some concern there, but that was perhaps the least disturbing thing to come to light. A Tyrsian spoke next.

“I heard rumors that there was some sort of evidence that we, or more accurately, the Eshrelia, had a weapon that worked on the Uncalled. Is this accurate?”

“Yes and no. The Eshrelia Crusader who was in the expedition, during the fighting, began swinging heavily with a gravity hammer, almost blindly, and the enemy signature that would have been impacted by the weapon dropped out of contact. Whether this means said enemy was actually killed or simply withdrew, we cannot be certain.”

A Palnt was the next to speak. “That seems, along with the fact that they are detected as hyperspace mass shadows, to indicate that they are some form of dark matter amalgam being – the glue of the universe and physics gaining sapience of a form. At least, I’d be hard pressed to determine what other sort of being could alter gravity to the point of inducing temporal anomaly as well as all these other factors, and only seem to come to harm when struck by a gravity-warping weapon.”

The Ivari’s feathery crest lifted, and the avian sullenly agreed.

A human officer, one of the Hegemonic government, was the next to speak. “I heard rumors that the Precursors had created some sort of weapon capable of holding them off. Is there any evidence whatsoever?”

The Nathian on the little security council spoke up. “First off, could I respectfully request that the representatives of the more martial-minded factions of the Hegemony stop trying to figure out how to fight something that according to the Palnt shouldn’t even be able to exist, and that have definitely crumbled a civilization that makes us look downright primitive by comparison? Because I don’t think that’s a war we win.”

The human representative looked embarrassed, then replied. “Right, I suppose I should clarify. We don’t want a war with these Uncalled. We want to know what we have to work with should we accidentally do whatever it is they attack civilizations for doing. To that end…”

The Tenebrae gave an unsettling ripple of its flesh before replying. “Right. We have determined that, according to the Precursors, they “seeded the galaxy” with life capable of perceiving the Uncalled and the ability to tune energy weapon frequencies to strike at them. We have also determined that this species, whatever it was, was bred for war and may have been dependent on it, and definitely seemed to tend towards vicious conflict-seeking. And we have found some evidence in other places that this species may have…been genetically altered and turned on its creators, who either forgot to put in a kill switch or decided that the benefits of having cannon fodder to fight the Uncalled outstripped the risks of said cannon fodder being bloodthirsty and unstable.”

The room was slowly starting to realize where this was going.

“It is the opinion of the intelligence community and analysts that the beings the Precursor created to fight the Uncalled have already been encountered. They were, in all likelihood, the Sclunter marauders we exterminated some thirty two years ago.”

There was a long pause.

“The Marauders might have been a chance against these things…and we destroyed them.”

The human spoke. He did not say anything that anyone wanted to hear. “Hardly, I don’t think. They may well have been the weapon the ancients built to protect themselves from these things – but either they turned on their creators and permanently destroyed them, or they failed to stop the Uncalled. Because if it had worked, the Precursors would still be here. We’re on our own for this, and probably always were.”


	8. Probing Graves

“Spread my wings and just fly hoooooommmmmmmeeeee!” Ywyn’s singing wasn’t actually half bad, even if the crew was getting sick of the song she’d had stuck in her head for the last several days, which she mostly sung out of anxiety. Alicia was just sitting on her bunk, listening to Taldir sharpen his blades nervously at the thought of the next mission. Paenirc was a lot more nervous, and had been staying close to Taldir – the Tenebrae and the Keldebriar got along well as nations.

Tony was spending most of his time with the Nathians, their own clan especially. Jessie was running around with that Palnt techie, what was his name, trying to get their sensors tuned to be able to have a warning system if this next mission went FUBAR so they could retreat, and Alicia was finally getting to talk to the Galri about maybe gene-modding some of the organics around them to be able to sense the Uncalled if anything…happened.

It had been a few months and the information was being disseminated solely to those who needed to know about the events on the Titan of Carrion – the strange aliens that had brutalized a well prepared, all veteran boarding party without ever being detected. And here their little crew was about to be landed on Garvalax – the planet that that dreaded hulk had been so near at the time. An Eshrelia Crusader had also joined the expedition with the gravity hammer – one of those super-soldiers whose mutations were now causing sufficient pain that they looked for an honorable end to their life. If a fight happened, it would be that one’s duty to stand against the Uncalled.

The little team was terrified and nervous – and the Galri was praying to find nothing deadly or amiss. Paenirc and Taldir were staying close to each other. Alicia, Tony, and Jessie as well. Taldir stood up, tail flicking oddly, ears flicking with irritation, likely at himself.

“Crew. We are exploring Garvalax today. Our mission is to determine what we can of the Precursor civilization to determine the nature of the Unturned and learn what we can of what brings them. To be clear, we are attempting to determine what this is so that we can avoid summoning them, not so that we can try to beat them. The Dembra and Palnt engineering and physicist teams got back to us and the Titan of Carrion, even now, twelve thousand years after it was built, is still structurally and technologically superior to anything successor species have created. We are learning about the precursor, and if things start going, as humans say, FUBAR, we are withdrawing back to the ship and getting out. Do not be heroes – that’s the Crusader’s job, and even they are only doing it because, as they say, their life cycle is coming to a close and are willing to fall honorably. We are also looking to discover any evidence of connection between the Precursor and the Tarvi – as well as any reference to the One in Waiting.”

The explorers nodded. They had a mission. One that hopefully wouldn’t go bad as hard as it could. There was a sense of quiet as Ywyn took them down. The surface of Garvalax was strangely silent – all the evidence of life – the cities were still lit. It wasn’t like the dead worlds that had been ravaged by Kyriion, where structures stood or fell and the signs of panic and rioting and mass death had been all too visible. This place looked eerie – the architecture was strange, suspended in ways that made Njos doubt that the builders had thought all that much of gravity as a concept. A Dembra along, Dolch, glanced at the place with loathing and confusion. Those spires – those angles – those shouldn’t function unless the Precursor had some ability to produce or engage with truly bizarre materials. Iolan, the Galri, was better prepared to see a place alive with machinery and nothing living than most of his kind – but that still felt utterly blasphemous to behold.

The ship gently touched down, the team stepping out in heavy protective gear – atmospheric scans indicated no toxins or radiation, and a breathable atmosphere, but then they weren’t sure what else might be present. This was a dead world, but from orbit, merely looking at lights, it would have fooled an observer into thinking things still lived here.

And maybe they did.

The little crew was in the middle of the city – no sense in landing in the outskirts, as there was little to nothing to disrupt. Jessie went with Dolch and Njos to get structural scans and figure out as much as she could. The Nathian, one of the Nilpi clan, Oppa, stayed close to Alicia and Tony – culturally Nathian, even if from another clan. Taldir and Paenirc went with Iolan, to preform the same function as the jokingly-designated “Team Nathia.” Illias and Ywyn went aerial again, scanning for life signs, hyperspace mass shadows, and preparing to interpret any records sent to them.

***

Tony chuckled as the three of them moved through one of the buildings that had clearly originally been for mass habitation – even if the gravity here felt a little off, like if they fell they couldn’t be totally sure they’d fall straight down. It made balance interesting. Still, Alicia was probing what she could find – the same lack of bones or organic material had been confirmed, and there was communication being maintained via LENS to make sure that the temporal anomaly experienced on the Titan of Carrion wasn’t going to see a repeat here. Thus far, the times hadn’t gone out of sync – indicating that that ancient hulk might have been a skunkworks for experimental technology of some kind, perhaps?

Oppa was rummaging through belongings, recovering anything with any writing or data storage on it. The strange alloys present themselves would be left for someone else to figure out – specifically Dolch and Njos and whatever experts they could contact. Alicia was all too aware of how loud her own breathing was, and the suit felt claustrophobic – was this how Mom and Dad had felt, in all those wars? Waiting in the black abyss of space for violence to start? Struggling to breathe in a tight cockpit – probably not, actually. She grinned. No, the videos from school, and her parents’ own admissions indicated that they’d have been more excited than afraid, to an unhealthy degree – though having that much combat ability and hardware to back it up probably helped.

Tony caught her eye. “Hey, Alicia? Relax. I know you’re thinking of home. We’ve got leave to see the family pretty soon. Mom and Dad aren’t going to die while we’re here.” The legendary pilots had been aging hard of late – and even her fearless parents were pretty aware that they had limits, and they’d been ignoring them most of their long lives. Lives that were now coming to a close as they approached the one limit nothing could deny.

“Yeah. Let’s focus. I…don’t want to think about that too hard.” Alicia opened the next door and found a safe. Not really one for patience and lacking a magnetic pick, she took to the option of chambering a frangible, or lock-breaker, round into her pistol and blowing it open at an angle that wouldn’t damage the contents. The little safe had quite a few data keys that might contain useful insight. Oppa laughed at the sight. “Yes. Team Nathia, represent.”

***

Taldir was getting restless – he knew it was improper for a Keld of his rank, but it was undeniable – just because his people’s faith was less anti-mechanical than Iolan’s didn’t mean that all these creations having outlived their creators by tens of thousands of years wasn’t unbelievably unsettling. The place was mostly dead – this seemed to be some sort of installation – military or research or both, he couldn’t be sure. There were weapons of a sort here, but there was no trigger, nor any way he could detect of aiming them…and from the shape they didn’t seem like they’d have the balance to be even remotely decent melee weapons, meaning that no firing mechanism or sights was a problem. Paenirc was looking around as well, finding a few things that indicated some degree of research – and her training was getting her to pick up all sorts of interesting things that might be translated later. Iolan was looking through the test tubes when they let out a sudden shout of shock.

“Found something alive!”

Taldir glanced over. “Report, biologist.”

“It’s…well, it’s not alive. Genetic material. Something engineered – uh….this is Sclunter. We have that theory confirmed, at least. They are the ones who made the marauders. No precursor…wait.” The spindly biologist shifted as he moved for another chamber. “There’s something over here.” Taldir followed with Paenirc.

Iolan chuckled. “We are finding all sorts of things today. There’s something in here – a few genetic samples, not Sclunter. We’ll take them back to the ship and analyze them, if we can find out anything about Precursor biology that could be useful.” Taldir grinned – that seemed like progress. Then Paenirc found something that beeped as she touched it.

“Organic life.” The voice was mechanical, and thoroughly dissimilar from the Synthor, at least. Sounded tired, not hostile. A recording. “If you are among a successor, then this recording is doing its purpose. Our investigations into the nature of the One In Waiting yield nothing, but we have some evidence of its involvement in our evolution. Our research into the life amongst the stars yields similarly little – the coordinates contained in this facility’s databanks can inform you of what other places we’ve looked and seen the touches of the One in Waiting or not. If you are a successor formed of its touch, don’t be afraid. Odds are you’ll be smarter than we were – heh, or dumber. Too smart or too stupid makes no difference – don’t try to poke a god in the eye, and don’t screw with the fundament of reality. If you are listening, I and in all likelihood, my kind, are dead. With luck, you won’t be next. The co-ordinates are in the central console – should be easy to strip the data from them. If you’re here to save yourself from the Uncalled and hoping we have some ideas – if the Sclunter, the “Monsters” project didn’t work ….heh, good luck. We’ve been forced to try for over fifty thousand years, and the things keep crushing us back to the stone age.”

Taldir cursed. “What did you DO to draw them, you arrogant bastards? I don’t need to know you couldn’t stop them – that’s obvious. I need what you did to draw them to begin with.” The cat’s ears were back beneath the helmet. “Iolan, take the sample. The rest of you, grab the co-ordinates. Tell Engineering to keep working on the structures and similar. Tell “Team Nathia” to head about three klicks south of their current position to check out that facility.”

***

“These alloys – they must have been using some hypercompression shit to get the molecules this tight.” Dolch grunted.

“Seem to. But we use magnetics to get that result – and I can tell you from the feel of this metal that they used something else. Ionic resonance is wrong for galvanic forging.”

Njos flickered the feelers around his nostrils – more prehensile antennae than anything. “Maybe. Could be gravity compression, but that would have been grotesquely inefficient, which is why we don’t do it.”

“Right, but then why would such an advanced civilization do it?”

“Because if you had the tech to make it practical, you have effectively unlimited energy sources – hell, you get more out of forging at that point than you put in, energy wise.” The Palnt shrugged. “Based on everything else they have around here, they might well have been able to – “

“Hold the fuck up how do they get past thermodynamics on that?” Jessie was skeptical.

“They don’t exactly – it’s closer to cheating with loopholes than anything. I figured you humans would appreciate that. When you lose energy you don’t so much lose energy as much as it becomes unusable – if you can manipulate gravity and the kinetic energy that comes with it, you might be able to close a loop of making unusable energy usable, using it, then making it usable again.”

Jessie whistled. “I guess that makes sense, and I knew that that kind of thing was possible in theory, but….it’s at least a few thousand years out for anything in the Hegemony.”

Dolch laughed. “Try nine thousand standard, Jaegar. It’s a long, long way off. And for all we know, figuring out how to do it is what brought the Uncalled down.”

“Right. But how could they get something that would let them…I have a thought.”

***

Alicia was shivering at the sight of the facility she was in now – carefully preserved bones of all sorts of things. Some familiar, some not, some clearly distant evolutionary cousins. She opened the comms with Taldir’s team. “Hey, have Iolan check this place out – all sorts of biomass to investigate. Some of it looks ancestral to Hegemony species, some of it is stuff I’m pretty sure was wiped out by Kyriion…and I have no idea what some of it is.”

“Understood, Andala. I’ll send one over.”

What the fuck had happened here? What were the Precursor doing with all this, preserved long after their own bodies had been completely erased?

Tony shuddered. “Hey, Alicia? Look at this.” He gestured to the wall, and there, in the diagram, was a series of things that looked like they might be genetic sequence signatures…and the phrase again. “What will be was, what was, will be.”

But that wasn’t what had driven the shakes into Tony’s voice. The boy was the son of champions of humanity. What had made him shudder was that in the preservative tank next to the sequencing. It wasn’t perfect, and it was definitely not fully evolved – but that was definitely a human ancestor.


	9. Precursor's Hand

The human ancestor in the preservative tank, long dead, stared at the landing party with unseeing eyes. Alicia was staring at it, mind swirling with the implications. The Precursors hadn’t just created the Sclunter – if this meant what they thought, the Precursor had possibly created humans – and from the figures in the other tanks, possibly the Keld, the Tyrsians, the Palnt, Dembra and Galri as well.

They took evidence of what they had, and then deployed small extractors onto the tanks to get samples of the biological material that could be processed by the Galri to confirm their suspicions – they needed to be sure. The star-shaking implications that many of the galaxy’s current main life forms were made by precursors – wait.

In a few more of the tanks, there were more bodies – most of which matched nothing the little team had ever seen. They uploaded the images and the bioscans to the database aboard the ship as well. Then Tony noticed the inscriptions around the tanks. “Illias, you have to come down here and see this. We need to know what these say.”

“Stars, human, just scan the inscriptions and I’ll have them translated by the time you get back on the ships.”

“We need to take imaging of the life forms too. Maybe the unfamiliar ones can be found, or were destroyed in any of the calamities that have struck the galaxy since the Precursors were destroyed. I want Iolan to look at this.” That was Oppa’s point, but the Nathian’s voice was shaky.

That was an interesting thought, Alicia reflected, but she was more fascinated with the ominous inscription on the wall, the image of the strange being from within the black hole on the obelisk. Same geometry. Same strange curvature, mysterious angles that played tricks on the mind to look at it, same mysteriously malicious appearance that called to mind all manner of horrors from pre-Republic Terran fiction. The Tarvi worshipped it, and were apparently carrying out a genocide of sorts – or attempting to – in its name. The Precursor had known it, but the translators had said it was hard to tell if they saw it as a deity, or if so, a good one to be worshipped or an evil one to be overcome.

Illias was working through the inscriptions as they were scanned.

***

Paenirc was quivering uncontrollably as she slid deeper into the strange installation alongside Iolan and Lt. Taldir. The Tenebrae couldn’t shake the sense that something was watching them, unseen. It might just have been nerves, but Paenirc wasn’t sure. This place, with its strange architecture, seemed malevolent the more they learned. The coordinates had been taken off the main console and sent to the ship for Ywyn to start charting a course there, but right now Taldir was pushing them deeper to try to find anything they could use.

Iolan’s nerves weren’t holding up better than Paenirc’s, though for a different reason. The Tenebrac was of the subset of their people, from the swamp region of the northeast quadrant of their original homeworld, that had been the most reviled and brutalized of their people during the brutal racial violence that plagued the species even after it had joined the galactic community – and had been brought to a close by the intervention of the Keldebriar Empire some ninety standard years before humanity’s rise to galactic relevance and the Dominion War. That history of violence had left a sort of intergenerational fear in Tenebrae of that subset, one that lent itself well towards paranoia about this sort of situation.

Iolan’s terror was different. This place wasn’t just dead, it was blasphemous. More so than anything since the Synthor. It would be impossible to top beings who abandoned organic flesh for metal and wire before attempting to force all others into such damnation, but a place whose technology and machines had gotten far enough ahead of their wisdom that the galaxy itself felt the need to slap them back into the dust, with the chatter from Team Nathia indicating that they’d also possibly been responsible for many of those who’d come after…it was a nightmare that added all sorts of doubts to Iolan’s ideals.

Taldir seemed unphased – save for the tail flicking, agitated, and the helmet clearly having shifted position from the flattening of his ears. But like many Keldebriar soldiers, the Lieutenant was a master of pushing down fear to handle the task at hand. “We have to go deeper, find any other data we can. Human endurance, Keldebriar discipline, Tyrsian ferocity, Eshrelia valor and desire for redemption…they’ll all be useless against the Uncalled, so we need to figure out, as soon as we can, how we can avoid bringing these things down. And the recording we just found…wait.” He keyed the comms to Nathia team. “We recovered audio recording that Illias translated. I’m having it patched through to you now. May shed more light on what you’ve found.”

Without waiting for reply, Taldir signaled Illias. “Patch them the recording we picked up and sent you.”

He kept searching the place, trying to find any data that could be useful.

***

Team Nathia took in the recording. “If you are among a successor, then this recording is doing its purpose. Our investigations into the nature of the One In Waiting yield nothing, but we have some evidence of its involvement in our evolution. Our research into the life amongst the stars yields similarly little – the coordinates contained in this facility’s databanks can inform you of what other places we’ve looked and seen the touches of the One in Waiting or not. If you are a successor formed of its touch, don’t be afraid. Odds are you’ll be smarter than we were – heh, or dumber. Too smart or too stupid makes no difference – don’t try to poke a god in the eye, and don’t screw with the fundament of reality.” The rest of the recording was cut, but according to Ywyn it was the aforementioned navigational data and a confirmation that the Sclunter were in fact the work of the Precursors.

“The One in Waiting – the thing in the black hole? Are these things that the Precursors altered or things they thought that creepy thing changed?” That wasn’t any more comforting for Alicia – being created by these things who’d been stupid enough to destroy themselves like this was rattling and disturbing as a revelation, but to be altered by the thing that was connected to at least one genocide and the implication of the end of a far more powerful civilization was outright terrifying.

“Alright, recover any samples we can. Illias, what can you tell me about the inscriptions?”

Illias paused. “The one near the Keld says that this was a species that they suspect had something to do with the One in Waiting…but that they aren’t sure to what the degree the being was involved. The one near the Galri says much the same thing, with the note that it may be in the Precursor’s best interest to modify the Galri at some point because of how malleable they are, how many options it might give them. Those near the Palnt and Dembra indicate some Precursor involvement, but there’s a fair bit here that’s a little too technical and that we don’t have enough data to go on to translate properly.”

“Alright, and what about humans?”

“Not sure. Still working on that one. Seems to say that they can’t be sure to the extent you’ve been modified already, or if at all. As to the inscription by the emblem of the One in Waiting…” Alicia waited with baited breath.

“Research facility, seeking degree of involvement. Pondering options. Altering other species may create backup options should the Sclunter project fail. Should consider seeding further life forms among the stars. Consider. Samples here from throughout galaxy, further coordinates at strategic space and research center. What will be was, what was will be. Must determine aspect of that phase which is biological, interpretive, or literal and metaphysical.”

That didn’t exactly explain a lot, but it indicated that the situation was more complicated than they’d believed.

Taldir’s voice took over the comms. “For right now, return to the ship.

***

Njos looked at Jessie. “What’s your idea?”

“Well,” she said. “The Precursors used gravity-based tech a lot, apparently. And the only weapon that seemed to have any effect on the Uncalled was a gravity hammer. And we know, from black holes – where apparently the One in Waiting is – that gravity effects time. Like the Uncalled do. And they seem to be dark matter beings….the matter that makes gravity work. What if…what if the Uncalled think they were defending themselves?”


	10. Police Action

The Hegemonic Guard were loading weaponry and preparing to enforce some basic order in the Ephailas sector. There was a group of terrorists harassing the Eshrelia looking for revenge for the war fifteen standard years prior, and Joan Bonhauer was going with them. She wasn’t totally sure how she felt about that – BASTION STANDS! – she’d been on that world, seen Jaegar’s death on the battlefield, seen the horrors they’d committed during the war, but then, those who still existed were among those who had followed their new Imperator, Nex’arra, who had turned around and brought their personal legion against the rest, bringing their people into the Hegemony as a new ally.

The Guard, specifically chosen without an Eshrelia unit so that they could deal with the rebellion without inciting further racial violence. The terrorists weren’t well armed and after a few months of Tenebrae infiltration and cordoning off the area to avoid them either escaping or causing more trouble, the Guard was preparing to go dig them out with bayonets. The troopers were in standard tactical gear – more than enough to stop the projectiles from the weapons that the terrorists had been seen using.

The troop transports deposited them onto the small moon, a little back-vacuum with little in the way of resources where they’d confirmed the presence of the cell’s base. Joan was a bit nervous as she always was before a battle, but she had her orders and after all, had been one of the veterans of Bastion. They’d been told to hold the line, and the planet had broken before the Guard had.

The Sundered Shadow and other troop transports came to the ground on the cordoned region of Tantiv, and the troopers exited the ships, fanning out and checking the area for the terrorists. A few tracer rounds from standard combustion weapons rattled out of a window and bounced helplessly off the tactical armor and a single sniper with a precision rail rifle dropped to one knee, took a sight and fired. “Target eliminated.”

The troopers broke into platoons and continued moving. Joan felt pretty confident, apart from that ill-advised initial contact, the enemy hadn’t engaged at all. It was just a matter of finding them and dealing with them – or so she’d thought until a shaped charge took out one of the armored vehicles that had been sent with them. A series of shots, this time from plasma weapons began raining into the infantry units around it, several having their armor melted through and being blasted away with plasma shots before they could regain their feet from the explosion. Joan cursed and moved up, taking a sight at the spot where the shots had come from, sending plasma bolts towards the position the fire was coming from. “Where’d they get proper combat gear like this?” Normal slug-throwers were fine, but plasma weaponry, “Baneslayer” carbines and their SMG variant, the “ripper” as well as railguns were supposed to be military-only.

These terrorists must have raided an arms depot, which meant actual soldiers had been working with them or smuggling them arms. She’d lost twenty-three troopers and an armored vehicle to these assholes and wanted to deal with the problem quickly. Once there were no further shots forthcoming a handful of assault troopers moved into the building. Joan heard a few shouts, but no more of her own troopers dropped off the IFF of her helmet’s HUD. A few minutes later, the soldiers came back out with a handful of terrorists, arms in POW position – though that varied species to species, as that particular position wasn’t actually much of a slow-down to Tenebrae or Keldebriar.

However, to Joan’s shock, there were more than a few other things among the enemy – Ghenkl. The arboreal amphibioids that had been among the first victims of the Esharioc war. Where the first hard contact between the legendary Adisa and the Esharioc had occurred. “Why are you fighting against us?” They were screaming at her, and when they saw the Bastion Veteran badge that she and a few others were wearing, their voices took on an outraged tone.

“You saw Jaegar die! You fought to hold them off! And now you’re fighting to protect his killers?!” The shouts cut Joan to the core, but then, Jaegar had fought alongside Tyrsians after having fought in the Dominion War, so odds were had Jaegar lived he’d eventually have made peace with the Eshrelia when it ended. And words from Lt. Shen of Aid Corps, quoted over and over and made famous as an ideal outlook on unity in the aftermath of the Hegemony’s wars came to her.

“General Graador is dead, killed in battle by Jaegar himself. The Esharioc who fought against him, and those who’d been part of the Genocide on Ghenkl are dead. Admiral Tusaroth is dead, killed by Jake and Callie Andala above Tildas II. The Priest of Balefire who destroyed Bastion is also dead, slain in the last heroic act of Rear Admiral Shiloh Hendrix and Admiral Palitin a’Tael. The Imperator and the horror of a government it led is DEAD, killed by Shaed, Adisa Imari, and Prian a’Tas. What revenge are you actually looking for and against who that actually hurt you? The Crusaders who eagerly dive into any battle on behalf of the Hegemony to gain redemption?”

The terrorist just stared. “I’m not explaining shit. I’ll answer to a jury if I have to. But not to you. Traitor.” Joan paused, then nodded. “Take them into custody. We’ll try them later. We have more…” Another massive bang shook the streets and cracked the road. Another tank’s IFF dropped off. “We’ll have a word about who’s been supplying you later. We have a battle to finish.” Joan moved away as a few more other soldiers took that criminal into custody, trying to clear her head.

The Eshrelia had been more than willing to lay their lives down for her and many other species in the Hegemony – their new religion still had something of an unhealthy view of martyrdom even if it was now about protecting other species from disasters. She’d seen the volcanic disasters on that volcanic hellscape that the Dembra used as a geothermally powered foundry-world. There’d been more than a few Crusader’s who’d put their heaviest protective gear on and staggered into zones too hot for anything to survive to help plug a breach, knowing they’d only have a few minutes before their gear failed, and they’d done it anyway to protect the Dembra and Palnt who’d set up cities on that world to provide many of the materials that the Hegemony required.

Joan shook her head to clear it as she continued running towards the sounds of the firefight, the plasma carbine that had become her favorite weapon clenched tightly as more fire rained around them. A Tyrsian heavy weapons trooper – one whose name she hadn’t had a chance to learn, he was from a different battalion – joined up with her. When they saw the situation some of their other comrades had gotten into, pinned down by heavy fire from the insurgents, the Tyrsian unlimbered his weapon and loosed a devastating torrent of high velocity tungsten onto the building the enemy were firing from, the heavy, relativistic rounds crumbling the walls and ripping into the enemy position and dropping them. Militarized worlds, like Bastion, had had architecture that could have stood up to such a barrage as a matter of fortification, but this world wasn’t built to withstand the fury of war – the rounds went clean through the building as Joan sprinted in under the cover of the torrent of fire.

The plasma carbine hissed and snapped menacingly as a bolt fired off and downed another insurgent in a blast of ionized and contained gas. Other troopers followed her into the breach and the terrorists surrendered rapidly, save for a few who fired anyway, quickly being cut down. Finally the recon fliers that had come in with the Navy were able to report a full scan of where everything was. Only a few nests of terrorists remained active in the area that had been cordoned off for the duration of the police action the Guard were undertaking. A tank squadron – forty-two total vehicles – were moving to handle the one furthest west, and she decided to leave that one to them. There was one only a few kilometers north of here, and with the trickle of other guard infantry coming in she had an undersized battalion – some seven or eight hundred troopers to deal with it. She detailed thirty of them to escort the surrendered enemy and transport the wounded back to the medics, while she took the remainder forward to deal with the next cluster. A Palnt techie moved up with them. “If you can cover me, I have a device to detect explosive triggers. I’m not a soldier but I can keep you from losing anyone else to mines.”

Joan nodded. “Understood, stay close.”

The unit moved up with the Palnt occasionally shrieking for a halt and carefully directing traffic around where mines were, but on the upside he – she – they – sexual dimorphism in Palnt was pretty limited and it was hard to tell – was good to their word and no further IEDs exploded in the ranks of the Guard.

The IFF of another nest dropped off as another unit took them down, and Joan advanced in the face of the enemy fire, nerves of steel forged on Bastion showing as she pushed forward with her troopers, heart pounding in her ears when they finally broke through and eliminated the last cluster of enemy troops. Just as she thought she was done, a Tenebrac detached from the wall and started strangling her. Spots flashed in front of her eyes, and the tentacled being hissed in her ear. “We aren’t fools. The Hegemony are hiding something. What happened on the Titan of Carrion? We’ve been hearing all sorts of rumors and we need to know.”

Joan gasped and struggled until the Tyrsian hauled the Tenebrac off of her and threw it down, and before it could struggle to its feet a series of shots rang out and eliminated the terrorist.

“Alright. We should be all clear. Fan out and check but…”

“Hey, major?” The comms crackled in her ear. “We picked up a weird thing. Think you should see it. Patching it through to your HUD.”

“10-4.” The image that flashed onto her HUD was familiar. She’d seen inscriptions aboard the judgement of Carrion. The same exact one – it was imaging taken from that. The writhing mass of something in the bowels of a black hole, with the inscription, “The One in Waiting.”

She murmured, heart sinking with a hunch. “What will be was, what was, will be. Was that a warning about the Uncalled or about the chaos that follows knowledge of them?”


	11. Smuggler's Trouble

The Ephailas sector was quiet now after the Fleet and the Guard had dealt with the terrorist sect, but questions remained unanswered. Questions about how the enemy had come to be armed with military grade weaponry, questions about how the enemy had come to hear any degree of detail about what had been discovered aboard the Titan of Carrion, questions about what the connection was between the recent terrorist actions and the evolving mystery of the Precursors. To that end, an Ivari smuggler, Ritia, Harriet Stilson, formerly of one of the Viper Teams, now transferred to Intelligence, along with a Keld named Liok e’Tas, were looking into the matter, an actual smuggler-turned-mercenary and two Intelligence operators to investigate the matter.

To that end, they’d gone to the urbworld where the fighting had broken out and were asking around, often in places that Ritia had traded before, posing as a common smuggler and her bodyguards. The scent of intoxicants, the rough shouts of brawls and the coarse calls of bets on the winner were like home to Ritia – ever since her exile from the Ivari for bucking the old Archon’s orders, she’d been at home amongst the rougher areas of the Hegemony, with the rougher people who made their living on the outer edges of the law.

The Eshrelia in the room was providing drinks – one of the natural-borns, not the giant Crusaders bred for a war now come to an end. Stilson took a drink, and Ritia did not. Ivari weren’t really expected to consume intoxicants anyway – with only one exception, they weren’t really safe for her species, and that one exception would be out of character from a successful smuggler. Liok’s eyes were darting around, tail flicking nervously. Which aggravated her. They weren’t being watched yet.

And annoyingly with the Eshrelia in the bar, playing weapons buyer would lead to more trouble. So, plan B. She drew forth a small packet from her pilot’s jacket, and asked one of the locals – a Dembra – if he had any interest in her product. Play the dealer, play the smuggler, they knew she came in with illicit goods now and then, which the Hegemony believed she did to keep up contacts and which she actually did because regardless of what the government thought she was still very much a smuggler at heart. The Dembra waved her off, which wasn’t shocking – she’d only met a handful of his kind for whom hypozine was actually a drug of choice. She had a bit of kadis powder as well, which was similarly turned down, though one of the Tenebrae actually was willing to buy that. It didn’t really kill the cephalopods, but it certainly made their slippery bodies change colors much more erratically and let them trip out on the pretty kaleidoscopic hallucinations that their chromataphroic hides would try to imitate. She pocketed a few credits and continued the game.

Stilson and Liok stayed silent and looked intimidating, as bodyguards usually did in places like this. Ritia asked a few questions, here and there, about the trouble that had happened recently, if anyone managed to steal any good salvage off the battlefield, whether chunks of armored vehicles or anything else.

One person, a human, was talking to her. “Nah. Couldn’t get much. Guard were pretty good at locking down the area and grabbing up the gear of both their own and their enemies. They’re trying to figure out who it is that gave the terrorists their gear or leaked some information or some shit.”

Ritia paused, then took a shot in the dark. “I got work recently with the Zhan Cartel in the Emberin Sector, looking to get some decent gear for some turf fight they’re prepping for with some pirates. If whoever was selling them weapons wants to liquidate their extra inventory at a profit to avoid the Hegemony finding the evidence, I’d be interested.” There was a cartel in that sector, but the ax was going to come down on them very shortly. Plus the Ghost of Sparta and a few other pirates that often picked fights with other criminal syndicates was last spotted in that sector, meaning that everything she just said was a very plausible lie.

The human goon chuckled, nervously. “Not real sure who was selling it, but sounds lucrative. And hey, for a few credits for myself, I could be convinced to put the word out that the…what is it, the Vaati Cartel?”

The other guy was clearly probing to see if he could catch Ritia in a lie for being a mole or a spy, but she wasn’t dumb. This was a standard practice in the seedy underworld on most Urbworlds, where they’d check to make sure you kept your story straight. Usually if you didn’t they waited til you left your current location, then dragged you off somewhere and put an explosive 12mm in your head.

“No, the Zahn. The Vaati got caught up in a crackdown a while back. Didn’t you hear?” She couldn’t resist, and the other man nodded. “Yeah. And to put word out?”

She tapped a datacard against his a few times – fifty credits. Not a miserly sum but not a huge one. It’d pay to get someone talking.

***

Harriet watched Ritia operate and kept an eye on the goings on, keeping an eye on her surroundings until Ritia told her and Liok to go screw around and see who they could get to chatting with them over a friendly game or two. Harriet pulled up a chair and threw a bit of money on the table before pulling out a deck of cards. “Anyone up for a game of three-slice?” A few others sat down, including a Palnt who had a cybernetic eye and a Galri who had traded their species’ usual slenderness for a body of whipcord like muscle, and who carried a strange weapon strapped to their back. “Alright, we’ll see what you’ve got.”

Harriet dealt the first hand and put a bet down on the first and third “slices.” The game was played with a hand of six cards, and you sorted your cards into pairs that each had their own point value. You could bet on individual slices, or you could bet on the value of your whole hand as “uncut” but if you did the latter you were essentially taking a gamble on if you got the whole pot or lost it all.

And at least one of Harriet’s good bets had been a bluff, which, unfortunately for her, was called by the Galri. The cyborg Palnt overestimated how much of her work was bluffing and wound up losing hard on “first slice” with a truly shitty pair. So it wound up being about even. The bet went up the next round and it was the Galri’s turn to gamble, while the cyborg started talking a bit here and there about the slapdown that had happened.

Liok was grinning a little too much and wound up being a little disappointed when no one put any high bets against his second slice. “So, what’s your birdy boss hoping to find?”

“Decent money, decent trades. Heard there was someone trading black market weapons and we were hoping to buy some and sell them to the Zahn cartel.” The cover story had been gone over agonizingly ahead of time until they all knew it in their sleep. Harriet forced her face to remain blank as the third hand she got she realized had absolutely no good way to slice it. She ate the loss and smiled a bit at her next hand – absolutely no better at all, to be honest – but she got a bit of information. “Eh, try chatting up Dilic – he’s got some ins with a few of the foundries and he knows how to put together the spare parts. Least that’s what I hear. He might be the one to go to.” They misread the widening smile as a sign that she had a good hand and didn’t bet against her on the slice she had placed first – which meant she got a decent bit of cash for the next time she was on leave.

“Dilic, he a Dembra?”

The Galri nodded at Liok’s question. “Yeah. He is. Couldn’t tell you where to look though. Might be a little less into the faith than most of my people but I still don’t like getting that close to that much machinery at once.” Liok nodded as he finally got a decent amount of money out of a bet on one of his slices.

“Speaking of which, what is that lance?”

“Coralstave. The points at either end have some really toxic mollusks on them. It’s one of the very few weapons Galri are allowed to have, being both alive and representative of merely natural processes of self-defense. Many things use venom as a matter of protecting themselves, and with the length of our limbs a stave can be quite helpful.”

“I didn’t know that any of you had martial training.” The other being shrugged.

“It depends. I am of a specific sect that believes in going on long pilgrimage to see as many worlds, life forms, and ideals as possible while hoping to see a space whale during the journey. And thanks to the likes of the Sclunter before the Dominion’s conquest we had to have some way of defending ourselves on those journeys. Name’s Tilli for the record. Yours?”

“Liok. And his?”

“Hers. I know we Palnt don’t have much in the way of sexual dimorphism but we do have some, come on. It’s Rlia, for the record.” The Palnt’s catfish like whiskers twitched with annoyance. “You can tell by looking at the whiskers, for the record. Female Palnt have more space between our eyes and sharper points on the feelers, where the males have more clustered eyes and rounded feelers.” Harriet hadn’t known that herself but filed it away for future use.

“And you guys know the weapons dealer?”

“Don’t get too snooty, smuggler. You’re trading with the Zahn. At least Dilic is just trading in gear that people think they need – more and more is coming out about how little the Hegemony tells us about some shit they’re learning about the Precursor extinction. And some info when he and his crew can come by it.” Liok chuckled.

“Not getting judgy. Just asking. Oh, what’s the situation on Pol Torin, by the way?” There had been some rumors about growing unrest on the Galri colony, caused by a sect that had decided that any mechanical tech to touch the ground would be destroyed and its carriers temporarily arrested.

Tilli chuckled. “Oh, not much. Kiasa went there a few weeks ago on xer coralglider and started talking to the leadership of the rebellion to get them to calm down a little bit. Seems to be going fairly well, and high cleric Imdi is getting a handful of our people’s warriors together to restore order if absolutely necessary.” Liok grunted. “Makes sense.”

At some length the game came to a close – and hey, Harriet thought, I even made some money gambling – and they turned to go with Ritia. Once they were outside and began moving towards the hotel they were supposed to be staying at, they noticed a few Tyrsians following them. And a few humans. And one or two Keldebrair – many of whom, to Liok’s horror, bore the brand of traitors and exiles. It was for those who had committed crimes too terrible for mere imprisonment to suffice but not adequately horrific to qualify for execution. To simply be cast out of the Empire. “What’s the plan, Ritia?”

“Draw your weapons, but don’t fire.”

Harriet did, the Lancer pistol’s weight comforting in her hand as she turned around. “Hold. We heard you were looking for Dilic, right? For business? Don’t worry. We’re just here to take you to him. If that’s what you’re after.” Ritia paused, then nodded.

“Tell him we’re happy to meet.”


	12. A Clue From Memory

Alicia was still shaking after the revelations of Garvalax. The Precursors had radically altered a lot of life in the Galaxy – and now, having recovered the navigational data from the Precursor laboratories regarding planets and areas where the touch of the One in Waiting had been felt or suspected – and where the Precursors had meddled in things themselves. Several of the worlds were ones already fully scanned, and had been emptied of sapient life either through stupidity or Kyriion. However, some others were in areas that had yet to be probed, or were considered out of the way enough to not have set anyone down to. With that in mind, Ywyn had set a course for one of them in the same sector the Tarvi had been located in – the Tarvi, who, it was noteworthy, were among those who had been tampered with by both the Precursors and the One in Waiting, according to the Precursors themselves – though the tampering had happened while they were massively pre-sapient.

The Searching Wing flew into the void, and as Alicia stared out the viewport with Tony nearby, she wondered if her parents had ever felt this way when they were young. Not sure where they were going, scared out of their minds about what they’d find next. Maybe they had been, maybe they’d been too turned on by the insanity and the fear to actually be worried about it. Everything they were doing these days was so classified that they weren’t going to be able to send a message home via the LENS network for some time – and getting leave was off the table until they at least knew what had been going on, or at least had some evidence that Jessie’s hunch was correct.

To break through her own spiraling headspace Alicia turned to Jessie. “So, you think the Uncalled were defending themselves. Any idea what the hell the One in Waiting is?”

Jessie shrugged. “Ever heard of Shemer’s last law? Because that’s what comes to mind for me.” That was a disquieting thought.

“The Precursors are – or were, I guess – already pushing that. You think the One-in-Waiting is something even more powerful?”

“Probably. If they thought it was connected to the things destroying them, it probably is? Hell, even if it isn’t the way they talk about it, it has to be something beyond their understanding – at least as far as their technology is beyond ours.” Alicia took that in, then shrugged.

“Maybe. Paenirc, what do you think?”

The Tenebrae woozily slithered upright. “I think I was trying to take a nap and that you lot need to figure out that me being visible does not mean that I want to have to think. But honestly? I think it’s at least possible. I want to know what the Precursors had to do with the Tarvi.”

Dolch rumbled. “Not a bad point. And while I respect the human engineer, I want to know a little more certainly about the reasons for the Uncalled.” The Dembra wasn’t one for speaking much. But everything about the Uncalled, had, for whatever reason, absolutely unnerved him. The Nathian aboard wasn’t much more talkative, though she at least curled up between Tony and Alicia – different clans or no, adoptive family were adoptive family. “I want to know what things were doing with evolution. Why we all became what we did. And I want to know how the fighting began to begin with.”

Ywyn was strangely quiet, and Taldir eventually stood and did a strange stretch that reminded Tony and Alicia of nothing so much as the giant cat he resembled. “Ywyn, you’re the longest-serving spacer aboard. What do you think?”

Ywyn was silent for a moment as hyperspace sprawled out in front of them until she finally shook herself and spoke.

“I think I’ve bounced all around the galaxy during my long exile from the Ivari Ascendancy and I’ve seen plenty of evidence of a lot of very, very strange things over the years of traveling – over a hundred Terran years, mind you. Never seen anything like the images of the One In Waiting, though I’ve seen plenty of black holes. Never seen anything like the Uncalled – though that may have something to do with the fact that I’ve never stepped aboard one of those dead hulks the Precursors left before. Things that old aren’t meant to be trifled with, regardless of what anyone says.” There was a long pause, then Ywyn stared out at the spiraling void of negative space and kept going.

“Used to stare out the portholes all the time, try to figure out what to do with myself after I was exiled, about eight standard before the Dominion War started. So a little before Jake or Callie Andala were born. I’ve gotten close to a few black holes in my day – some of them when I wasn’t really sure what I was doing there. But I never…”

She abruptly paused, then started talking very fast. “Hey. Every time I’ve been near a black hole, there’s a degree of static on my comms, even though they’re LENS network based, meaning that it functionally can’t be gravity interfering with radio-light waves. Meaning that it was picking up something near black holes.” Alicia began to see where she was going with this. Tony had apparently picked up even faster.

“Which means that if we go close, maybe we’ll pick up some communication with the One-in-Waiting, or at the very least some errant looping signal from the Precursors. Is that the thought, Ywyn?”

“I never thought it would matter, and I even tried to tune my comms to it once, just got gibberish, which at the time I wrote off as a side effect of isolation – maybe I was crazy, picking up an errant signal at an event horizon, but now I think that maybe…if we key it to the language of the Precursors and some of their ciphers, maybe we can pick up a more direct communication.”

Iolan spoke. “The mysteries of life, so close to a maw of nothing? What a fascinating irony. Then again, our own people learned from space whales, so maybe not. Illias, Njos, if I asked very nicely, could you two calibrate our LENS system to pick that up? And if we have enough of a lexicon on how the precursors communicated, maybe we can pick up some information on the topic?”

Taldir held up a pair of paws. “Hold. We are already on a mission regarding reconnaissance of planets these things were supposedly involved in. I don’t know that I can authorize any further deviance from our course to chase a hunch.” He took a pause, tail flicking thoughtfully.

“Actually. Maybe I can. Certainly whatever the Precursors or the One-in-Waiting left have survived this many millennia – they’ll manage a few more weeks. And this seems likely to be a better clue than anything the Precursors left – ancient curs always speak in crypticism and regret instead of anything informative.” It was clear that the good lieutenant was still more than mildly frustrated with the messages they’d managed to recover from Garvalax. “Set a course for the nearest black hole. Dolch, I want you, Jessie and Njos to go over every single system in the ship to make sure absolutely nothing is going to fail us. And Ywyn?”

“Yes, Lieutenant?”

“How close would we have to get to get a clear signal? To pick one up clearly, I mean?”

Jessie spoke. “Theoretically if it’s a LENS signal it should be able to be picked up anywhere, right? I mean that’s the whole point, that it can be used to communicate over massive distances. And that gravity wells won’t stop the signal.”

Njos coughed. “That’s true for values of true, but remember that most LENS relays rely on photonic resonance, which requires quantum entanglement. A black hole might not be able to stop photonic resonance but LENS receptors are synched to relays to be able to pick up from more than one source. It’s kind of miraculous that we were able to pick up at all – and with a relay that close to a black hole, it’s very likely that the entanglements are just a little…warped. If she was only picking it up that far out, it means that the relay is on the wrong side of the event horizon.”

Ywyn winced. “That’s sort of the problem. I had a lot of static and a lot of pulse distortion as close as I was. And the LENS system isn’t quite as infallible as most people are taught. I think we’ll have to get a fair piece closer to the black hole to be able to pick it up clearly, even with Njos recalibrating things and Illias here to translate.”

“Define “much closer,” skipper.” Taldir’s voice took on a dangerous growling note that made it abundantly clear that he was already rethinking how much he actually wanted to have approved of this mission.

Ywyn’s voice took on a very quiet, almost apologetic note, and Alicia felt with a sense of dread that she was certain she knew where it was going. “We’ll need to be straddling the event horizon, Lieutenant.”

“There’s only two pilots in history that have ever done that and survived it. And their children are on this ship.” The Lieutanant’s voice was quiet. “Are you absolutely sure you can do it, Ywyn?”

Tony grinned at her answer. Alicia only felt more nervous. “I trained with the Andalas, sir. I can do it.”

“Alright. Set course for the Ravening Spiral.”

Of all the black holes to choose from, of course they had to be closest to the one that the Ivari had named during that phase of their history. With that name.


	13. Peace Talks at Pol-Torin

Kaisa was approaching Pol-Torin, where a growing group of religious fanatics of xer own faith crying out against the ever more mechanized galaxy and decrying use of such devices as criminal, as blasphemous, as something that put everyone in danger from whatever it was that had destroyed the Precursors. “The Precursors built mighty machines but these could not save them. Now their great mechanical prowess only remains to mark their graves!”

Kaisa couldn’t even really argue – xe hadn’t been briefed on the nature of the demise of the Precursors, but xe had a flicker of temptation to agree, were it not for the violence this sect was inflicting on the Hegemony and the destruction of ships that landed there. Such actions could not, and would not, be sanctioned by the Faith of Life as preached by High Cleric Imdi. And Kaisa was going to negotiate with them, aboard xer usual coralglider as opposed to the mechanical ships. The Hegemony had been abundantly clear that they had no desire to send in the Guard – but that if genuine terrorism presented itself from this radical sect of Galri, they would have no choice.

Kaisa shuddered at the thought – while the symbiotic parachitin armor that Galri martial artists sometimes grew was proof against many things, it was not on par with tactical power armor. While it might hold up to standard bullets, and make its wearer considerably stronger, it also didn’t handle plasma well. And coralstaves wouldn’t have any effect at all on a Guard trooper’s gear. The war with the Sclunter had been regrettable, and once the Hegemony got underway, it had also been fairly one-sided. There had even been Galri who’d taken up the arms the Pol-Torin rebels were using during last-ditch defenses during the Esharioc Incursion. But even as one sided a conflict as the Marauder conflict had ultimately been, the Sclunter had managed to engage on far more even ground with the Hegemony through strength, ferocity, endurance, and adaptability, than the Galri would have any hope of doing.

Even the rebel ones.

Kaisa stepped off the ship and a few of the rebels stared at xer, openly. As xe walked into the open, a few of them approached her with their staves ready, and she spread her limbs wide in a conciliatory gesture. “I am not here to fight. I am here to clarify some misunderstandings between us and the Hegemony, and convince you to lay down your arms.” The rebels glowered, but a leader among them eventually came forward.

“What do you have to say if you would ask us to put our faith back in the hands of those who would trust us to machines? Those who would see the ruin of the Precursors, of what the Synthor became, and wish to follow a similar path?”

Kaisa’s body twitched. “First, neural snapshotting to synthetics is still extremely illicit in every aspect in the Hegemony precisely because of the lessons they learned from looking at the Synthor. Second, while the Precursors seem to have fallen because of violating some boundary that something else had, we do not actually have any evidence that this is due to machinery – given that we now know that they created the Sclunter, their bioengineering was very likely as powerful as their mechanical prowess – and while that decayed we have no way of knowing what it ultimately was that brought the attack down on them.”

Xe took a deep breath. “Further, while our people’s faith in the lessons of the Celestial Wanderers precludes us from using any mechanical technology, nowhere in our sacred texts is there any indication that we are supposed to oppose others in doing so – and our own faith should have made it abundantly clear that while it is one thing to grow parachitin symbiotes or coralstaves and wield them for self defense it is another thing entirely to use such things or our skill with them to force our will on others.”

A pause, as though everything had taken a breath. “Do you seriously expect us to believe that whatever destroyed the Precursor would destroy them for biological engineering when it has not yet come for us, or the Celestial Wanderers?”

Kaisa had to acknowledge that was a good point. “We don’t know. For all we know what the Wanderers do is such a singular purpose that whatever this is has no cause to harm them. But ours may not be. I don’t know, and neither do you. But even beyond that, I would say that it is perhaps more important to note that the violence you have inflicted is still well outside the law of both the Faith and the Hegemony, and that you should be ashamed of yourselves for falling so far out of fear. We never stooped so low during Kyriion, or during the Marauder War, or even the Incursion to attack anyone who came to our planets in a way incongruous with our religion. If you truly wished to demand that the Hegemony does not land mechanical ships on our worlds that is your right but even then we have no business physically assaulting the crews as you have! You put your followers in danger – High Cleric Imdi has asked me to come and convince you all to stand down to avoid any bloodshed.”

There was a long pause and several of them cursed and moved towards Kaisa, weapons raised, and xe instinctively dove aside while shouting at them to stop, then, remembering what Namna had done for xer, long ago, when xe had been captured by the Sclunter, began speaking calmly.

“I know we’re all frightened. I know the situation is terrifying, and I don’t necessarily like the machinery any more than any of you. But we can’t be willing to hurt ourselves and others out of fear that we don’t even know is justified. We can’t be willing to forego the most sacred beliefs of our culture, that other life is sacred and that we shouldn’t participate in violence against other life. Some of us were allowed to fight against Synthor during that crisis because they were, by their very nature, outside our sacred laws and posed a clear threat. But there have been reports of people attacked merely for being outsiders, and put in potentially mortal danger by venom from weapons invented, created and meant to be used in line with our sacred laws. You treated them to avoid pushing yourself too far past the limits of what was acceptable, which means you clearly knew what you were doing wasn’t right.”

Kaisa’s voice took a strained note at the end. These people weren’t necessarily evil. They were scared to death by the false and incomplete information leaking out from unknown sources, and the fact that there were some areas of the galaxy that were being cordoned off by the Fleet to attempt to contain and restrict any access to Precursor ruins in interest of maintaining secrecy and trying to clamp down on whoever was leaking information – and sometimes this had resulted in Galri making pilgrimages being forced to re-route or go around.

“We are afraid. I am too. I don’t know that much more than you do but I know that this panic, the violence, suddenly lashing out at everything around us isn’t going to make anything safer, it’s going to hurt everyone and cause more damage.” Kaisa was communicating with Imdi through xer own communication – a symbiotic hive creature that transmitted subvocal communications to another member of its hive, currently connected to High Cleric Imdi. To the Galri theocrat, xe was explaining as quickly as xe could that any show of force would be a bad idea at the moment, that any such thing would only exacerbate the problems.

“We want free access to pilgrimage, and we don’t want to have to host mechanical ships. We have no desire to hold anyone hostage, and were mostly doing so to prevent risk of orbital bombardment.”

“Who said anything about orbital bombardment?” Kaisa was relieved that xer play on compassion was working, as xe had hoped.

“It’s been a concern of what would happen if we pushed this too far.”

Kaisa flicked xer long left arm in a quick gesture of dismissal, the equivalent of a human shaking their head gently. “No. That was never a risk. I will contact Imdi regarding the rest.”

Imdi’s response was almost immediately mixed. “They can have specific mechanical free zones where the majority of their colonists are, and there can be fields that machine ships can’t land on. But there’s a few areas that investigators need access to, mostly on the south-western quadrant of the planet. In addition, full reparations for hostages, and some degree of reparation to the Hegemony as a whole. We need any information they can give on who’s been leaking information, as well. If they can give us that, there won’t be criminal penalties. As to pilgrimages – no can do. The more I learn about this, the more certain I am that the Hegemony’s secrecy is necessary.”

Kaisa relayed that, and the response was surprisingly sedate. “We can keep our own people away from the quadrant mentioned – it isn’t suited for most of what we want to do anyway. We can send the hostages home with full reparations, and as to information – I’m afraid we don’t have much, but we’re willing to co-operate to the degree that we can.”

Kaisa tried not to make it visibly obvious how relieved xe was, but couldn’t. The rebel cleric stepped forward and caught xer spindly form. “It’s alright, nura. You’re right. We were doing stupid things out of fear.” The strange honorific caught Kaisa off-guard – it was like “brother” or “sister” but for the transfer-omni sex. “I’m glad.”

There were a few groups of rebels who had to be subdued by Galri martial artists, but the Guard never became involved. What information could be gleaned about the source was limited – in fact, while even Kaisa never found out, it was more limited that what Ritia had already learned.

But for the day, the Pol-Torin rebellion was over, and mistakes that started in panic had not ended in armed conflict, which for Kaisa was good enough. Xe hoped that xer friends, especially the now-grey Namna would be able to help subdue other panic as it went, the same way xe had done so today, as Namna had done for xer all those years ago, when xe’d been stuck in a psychiatric holding cell after xer captivity.


	14. The Ravening Spiral

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Riding the event horizon to catch an errant signal.

Alicia’s grip tightened on the safety harness as Ywyn got a little closer to the Ravening Spiral. She could clearly see what was going on, but Ywyn had told them all to stay quiet – the Ivari exile might have trained with Alicia’s legendary parents, but that didn’t mean she could do this with all the panicked chatter of a terrified crew.

“Beginning approach. Njos, Illias, be ready.” The linguist and the tech had finished the signal pickups, and both Jessie and Dolch were strapped in by the engines, having thoroughly finished checking over every aspect of the ship to make sure it wouldn’t let them down now. Oppa, the Nathian, was praying quietly, paws clasped together. Tony clearly wasn’t joining in – the Malida clan they’d grown up with was considerably more secular. “Ywyn’s a pro. She can do this.”

Or maybe they just had faith in different things. Like training. And luck. Mostly luck, Alicia thought. Even their parents had said that they didn’t like their odds of being able to pull off an event horizon straddle a second time. “Ywyn can do this…” Tony echoed himself, nervously, as Iolan began humming quietly.

Of the crew, only Paenirc was actually quiet, and Taldir’s voice cut through the chatter at a purring growl. “Quiet. Leave the pilot to her work.” The _Searching Wing_ got closer to the Ravening Spiral, backup engines humming to life as she did so. The spiral wasn’t actually visible – but one felt it as the entire ship was pulled toward the maelstrom of space. Ywyn had, with the help of Jessie and Njos, calculated out the route she’d need to fly, with no margin for error. Ywyn began the final approach and flared the thrusters as she turned outward along the event horizon.

That was it. Too late to back out.

Ywyn’s universe narrowed as she flew, to the singular focus of her job. Fly this incredibly narrow path, no margin for error, or get yourself and the entire crew killed. As her old captain would have said, “no pressure.” The dyed feathers on Ywyn’s crest fluttered nervously, but they were dyed in the same scarlet-and-azure as the ships of the only people who’d ever done this and lived through it – a good sign, lucky.

The haul of catastrophic gravity was hard to deal with, but the _Searching Wing_ , like so many others, had been designed by the deep space wanderers of the Ivari and built by the master shipwrights of the Dembra – it had the power to survive this. If I’m equal to it, Ywyn added to herself, darkly. The ship wobbled slightly – but outward, rather than inward, and Ywyn corrected for it, talons gripping the controls hard enough to etch grooves into them. “Come on. Come on.”

Njos spoke. “This course is good. We’re picking up some of that errant signal you mentioned. Keep it up.”

It had only been three minutes. It felt like a lifetime. An Ivari lifetime, mind, not one of those “burn bright and burn out” human ones. The Searching Wing continued its course.

Alicia was shuddering, strained against her straps with fear, as the ship continued. Ywyn had this, she thought, but that wobbling had almost stopped her heart – Paenirc was pulsing, chromataphores shifting palettes rapidly in what was almost certainly a panic attack. Oppa had curled up between her and Tony, as though to seek comfort, and Iolan was clamping hard to the nearest life forms.

In the engine room, Jessie watched the work of the reactor – it was working. It was holding, even if they were going to have to power down after this to make sure nothing was overclocked. She signaled Dolch, who signaled the pilot in turn that the ship was still fine.

Ywyn’s claws shook as she guided the ship around the gentle curve – too soon and they’d die, too late and they’d lose the signal, with little chance of regaining it given that if this failed once, Taldir wasn’t going to approve it again. She kept it up, focusing with all her being on maintaining course. Unbidden, thoughts came to her from her years in exile. Wandering lonely among the stars, being allowed to stay among Nathians or Epomi who would have her – she’d never set foot on a Dembra world, the planets they liked had gravity too high for an Ivari’s frame to withstand.

She’d spent some time among Keldebriar, and among Tenebrae through the long years. Proving herself as a recon dart pilot, eventually being allowed back among her own people after her father had been disgraced and executed following the Keldebriar finding out about his own deadly deceits during the dominion war – then promptly getting exiled again after publishing her tell all about what she had seen of that government, things that disgraced yet other Ivari Archons. Being forced to work as a smuggler pilot – mind your distance, don’t ask too many questions – hearing about Tiger Squadron, wanting to join the group founded by humans who felt as out of place among their species as she had among Ivari.

The ship was going more smoothly now, and Ywyn took a few deep breaths, focusing on the instincts developed by the young of a species that flew in atmosphere or piloted ships since puberty and all the years and years she’d spent doing it. Years of being rejected from Tiger Squadron before finally being accepted, only to find that it was being run by someone new, a Captain Minas, who she’d been initially disappointed to find before coming to respect the woman. How happy she’d been finally working with them and feeling as at home on the Khan as she ever had, anywhere. The eventual return of the founders for the madness of the Incursion and the eight standard years of running around after that with Tiger Squadron before it had been disbanded – the irregular unit’s colors hung up, the Khan mothballed until it would require use again. She’d spent some time in Fleet before she decided to take up wandering with an eclectic crew again, and she’d published her other book –  _ Punkhawk: An Ivari in Exile _ – about her perspective on the galaxy after she’d made enough of a name for herself.

Njos called to her, and through the tightness of focus the calling seemed very far away.

“We’re loading the data – keep it up.” The challenge wasn’t so daunting now, even though she could feel herself losing blood flow to her talons as she piloted. Stars, but this was what she was meant to do – fly a way no one else could.

The Searching Wing had become an extension of her body – a large one, but part of her nonetheless. Tension was still high. The Ravening Spiral was close, and stars, it was every bit as eager to devour the little ship as the name implied, but now Ywyn was relaxed, and her apparent calm was doing good things for crew morale. The next few minutes drew along slowly – though whether that was the time dilation from being this close or just from stress was entirely up for debate.

When Illias spoke, Ywyn sagged with relief. “Pull away, pull away. We have the whole thing recorded – it loops.”

Ywyn pulled out, forcing the  _ Searching Wing’s _ engines to their absolute greatest output and hauled, agonizingly, away from the black hole before beginning to speed off, breaking the tight orbit she’d maintained around the black hole, punching the ship out, building up momentum and velocity until she had enough to punch through to FTL. They dropped out of hyperspace in the nearest distinct star system and Ywyn almost collapsed out of the pilot’s chair in sheer relief, crest fluttering and flaring rapidly as she realized how much panic she’d been holding in.

But stars, she’d done it! She was the third person, EVER, to fly that tight an orbit around a black hole and survive. Taldir’s ears had been flat back against his skull but he was now unstrapping himself, his massive paw buffeting her back in what for a Keld was a light blow so as to avoid damaging the Ivari’s fragile frame. “Well done, Ywyn. I’m proud of you.”

Alicia and Tony were hugging Oppa and each other before cheering her on. Alicia grinned. “Holy shit, Ywyn, that was incredible. My parents did it fast and in a firefight but you had to hold the position much longer and maintain it. Incredible.” Ywyn flushed with pride. She’d finally proven it. She was one of the best star pilots ever to live.

“So what did we recover?”

Illias held up a hand. “Hold up. It’s not fully translated yet. Give me an hour. Hey, Jessie, Dolch, how’re the engines?”

Jessie cursed. “Might have pushed them a little too hard on that final jump, so we’ll be stuck here for a few hours while Dolch and I do basic repairs but I wouldn’t worry too much.” Alicia sagged. That wasn’t too bad.

In the allotted hour that Illias had asked for, the message was translated as Jessie and Dolch kept working on the engines. They were called up for a break as the crew sat down to eat – crappy reconstituted, nutrient-dense rations that were more or less tasteless. To Alicia, the usually boring fare was delicious – probably the result of coming so close to death earlier in the day. Jessie and Dolch gave the report on the progress made on getting the ship back into full operation, and Illias offered up the recording before Taldir shook his head.

“We’ll wait. I am curious as well, but our first priority is getting the ship into condition to continue and making sure our crew is rested well enough to make good decisions with what information we’ve recovered.” A beat pause. “And I know full well that none of us will be able to sleep after we hear the recording. I can’t speak for the Galri, but I know full well that myself, the humans, and probably the Nathian are strung out from the endorphins of that situation – and at a guess, even if mammalian evolution has the harshest reaction to such things, the rest of you have them as well. We wait. We just witnessed some of the finest piloting in recorded history, and got information, probably, that…”

“Endirmas Blorgi would kill to get. Yes.” Illias’s voice was quavering, but certain.

“Right. For now, we celebrate our triumph and get the ship working. Tomorrow we listen to the recording and continue our mission.”


	15. Truth, Lies and Rumors

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ritia and her team investigate the intelligence leaks

Ritia was nervous, but trying not to show it. The small group of criminals had quickly accosted her and the rest of the small team and had begun guiding them back to the low-slung, heavily-built building in the backroads where Dilic, the arms dealer, had made his base of operations.

Harriet and Liok were flanking her, weapons at the ready, though from the bulk of the armed criminals around her she found it remarkably difficult to find that reassuring. She and her bodyguards would be direly outnumbered if trouble started, and outgunned, meaning that the best way to get out of this was to talk her way out of it.

Fine then. That had always been her specialty, as a smuggler or an agent. They’d been brought to this ugly, bunker-like building and been pushed inside, roughly. A man stood there, a brooding human with heavy arms and a brutal face, but he was sent off when another being came. A hulking Dembra, massive even for the giant engineers of the galaxy, with not one but two of his four arms replaced with industrial-looking cybernetic gear formed of some heavy alloy.

“So, smuggler. I hear you and your bodyguards are here for some weapons trading. Or more accurately, looking to buy weapons from me. Gotta say, I’m not too sure about how much I want to do that. Recent events have made me question who’s been talking.”

“Well. As it happens. You’ve never met me before. Or worked with me. So if nothing else, you know it isn’t me who’s been screwing you over.”

“That’s true, but I don’t know who it is, and in the aftermath of the Guard destroying that little band of radicals, I’ve had to deal with a few too many agents keeping an eye on arms dealers, and a few too many of my contacts in the Guard have wound up cashiered for me to be entirely excited about trusting strangers. Still, tell me about the offer you’re making.”

“The Zahns want weapons – apparently the Ghost of Sparta crew hooked up with a rival cartel, and are making things difficult for them. So they’d like to get a decent loadout they can use on their enemy’s mercs. And from what you’re saying yourself, you want to liquidate your inventory at a profit so that the Guard can’t find evidence. You do this, you get that, you get customers, you get money to rebuild your inventory and contact network later, and a ready market as a supplier to a pretty powerful cartel. What’s the downside?”

“For starters, I piss off the Ghost of Sparta and its crew – not exactly a gamble you want to make in these trying times. Two, if you get caught, I have the Zahns after my ass for getting one of their smugglers pinched. Three, even if this all works, I then have to consistently work for the Zahns.”

“The Zahns aren’t interested in exclusivity – they just want guns and don’t need anything else. As to the Spartan Ghosts – yeah, that’s not the best but given that they’re fighting the Zahns and on the run from the navy…no offense but a gun runner is not going to be all that high a priority for them.”

Dilic nodded. “I can certainly follow that chain of thought. And if you’re caught?”

Ritia took a gamble. “I have a few naval contacts in this sector who get little kickbacks for making sure my ship doesn’t show on scanners, and I came into some quality Tenebrae tech for keeping hidden a while back. I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Most smugglers have their ways of avoiding Hegemonic entanglements.”

Dilic grunted. “That is always the real trick, isn’t it?” Ritia tried not to laugh – Adisa had showed her that movie, she didn’t know if the gun runner had seen it.

“Yeah. So, we doing business or what?”

“Maybe. What’s the hidden capacity of your ship?”

“Eighty five cubic meters. Capable of liftoff and offload up to a quarter metric ton. Is that adequate?”

“More than.” Ritia nodded at his response – they were getting somewhere, and she had evidence of his participation in arming the rebels at least.

“Now, about the situation – show me your merchandise. We’ll talk price from there.” Dilic nodded, seemingly convinced that Ritia was in fact, just a low life smuggler out to make a profit on running some firepower for a cartel. He showed her and her body guards around, who remained absolutely quiet and let the experienced ex-smuggler look over the material they were going to be delivering as part of the disguise.

Though both Harriet and Liok had to restrain curses when they saw the sheer, staggering variety of gear that Dilic had to trade. Racks of railguns, baneslayer carbines, plasma rifles, vibroblades, gravity hammers, even some purging lances, pulse guns, anti-tank antimatter hand rockets, pallets and pallets of ammunition and energy cells. Ritia let out a low whistle, but Liok felt a flash of rage. Why would anyone take pride in making such weapons and selling them to those who would use them for sinister purposes? It was an effort to keep his claws, and knives, sheathed. But the mission came first, and the steely absolute discipline the Keldebriar race raised their children with re-asserted itself. Liok had a hard time reconciling it with the code of honor expected of an Imperial Keld – what he was doing in the name of this deception might cost innocent lives.

Harriet was struggling with similar misgivings – Vipers had done their share of shady things, and it wasn’t as though the Republic’s special forces had anywhere near the sterling record of the Keldebrair, but working with gunrunners and arming murderous cartels still wasn’t a point of pride, even if it was necessary. She told herself that the Zahns would soon be too swamped in a turf war with another criminal group to do a lot of damage to civilians. But that didn’t make it better.

Dilic was dickering with Ritia over the payment. “This is about twelve grand worth of weaponry and ammunition. Zhans have money, and I know for a fact they don’t send couriers without decent money to procure shit for them.”

Ritia shook her head, the feathers of her crest fluttering. “Come on. You’ve got the Guard about to descend on this place and take your entire inventory, and arrest you and your guys. You can knock that down to half as a thank-you for liquidating the evidence.”

“Half? That’s a joke. I’ll go as low as ten, but I’m not going six.”

“I don’t know, this is a pretty good load, but it’s not like it’ll be the last payment – I’m putting you in contact with a client that’ll want ongoing shipments, and I’m keeping you out of legal trouble for now. I think I could go as high as eight, given the quality I’m seeing here.” Dilic glowered, and signaled affirmative, slowly. “It is a buyer’s market, I suppose. Eight thousand it is.”

Ritia nodded and quickly began wiring the transfer – or made a show of doing so. “Then again, I heard a weird rumor. Someone in this area has an information leak from within the Hegemony’s military. Might be able to squeeze a little more out, claim the negotiations went a bit high. Could give you ten if you’ve heard any rumors?”

“What’s a smuggler doing looking for that kind of thing?” Dilic’s tone took on a suspicious note and both Harriet and Liok tensed before Ritia let out a trill of laughter and waved her hands. “Guns down, guys, relax, he’s just got a question. To answer it,” she turned back to Dilic, “Suffice to say I have a thing with one half of a pretty decent bounty hunting team, never hunt clients of mine and the one I’m not sleeping with gives little kickbacks when I find stuff out. Zahns expected to be paying around ten thousand for whatever you had, I figure it’ll let you, me and the friend all make a bit of extra profit off some idiot who’s running on borrowed time anyway.”

Dilic’s massive shoulders shrugged – all four of them. “A smuggler with a bounty hunter fling? This a joke?”

“Believe it or not, started out with them hunting me and me bullshitting my way out of it.” Ritia kept her gaze vaguely wistful as Dilic gaped. “Come on, would anyone be dumb enough to offer you a line like that if it wasn’t true? Give me credit – any smuggler who lasts long enough can lie better than that.”

Behind her, Harriet and Liok rolled their eyes as though they couldn’t believe their boss was bragging about that – Ritia’s crest fluttered again, excitedly.

“Bet that goes interesting places.” The Dembra’s voice was as flat as most of his people’s when speaking Galick, but there was an undisguised amusement.

“Like you wouldn’t believe. Ever been to nesting-down with a Galri martial artist? They do things with those forms you wouldn’t believe.” Ritia let her thick tongue roll that last line to emphasize the excitement of it, and Dilic glowered.

“Never been that lucky, but I can imagine. As to information – only so much. I know they’re male, and I know they’re a data-slicer somewhere in the Vetinari sector, but that’s about it.” Ritia swore, viciously. The Vetinari Sector wasn’t small – and it probably had the greatest concentration of Urbworlds of anywhere in the Hegemony. Finding a single individual in that wasn’t going to be easy. But maybe…there were options. A few of them.

“It’s a start. I’ll give you an additional eight hundred for it.”

Dilic nodded. “Right. Good luck.” She nodded.

“Any chance I can get some of your boys to help load the merchandise? I don’t have the biggest crew.”

The Dembra nodded. “Sure. Most of us started working in foundries at some point. Ship name, so I can keep an eye on it when you come back?”

“Laughing Kree.”

***

Once the ship was loaded and Ritia took off, Harriet exploded.

“ARE YOU INSANE!? That kind of lie? You are lucky that refuge in audacity works, smuggler!”

Ritia gave a quick laughing trill, her crest fluttering rapidly.

“For the record, regarding the bounty hunter – There is actually a Tyrsian and Galri martial artist who both follow some warrior monk thing that guides them to uphold laws, and I am, in fact, in an on/off thing with the Galri. That wasn’t made up.”

There was a long pause.

“So what is it like going to bed with a Galri martial artist?”

“You can only imagine.”


	16. Voice of the Ancient

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The crew of the Searching Wing hear the recording that Ywyn and Illias gathered at the event horizon.

The Searching Wing had been quiet after the near escape from the black hole - how close they’d come to death. But the translation was done now. After two standard days of work, Illias having now translated the message within that errant signal taken at the event horizon.

_“I have watched the origin of most of this galaxy – was there, waiting for company, when the Wanderers first developed sentience and began roving among the stars.”_ Iolan looked awed – something was speaking of his people’s gods in the tone grandparents used to describe grandchildren they were proud of. The recording continued. _“I do not know how long I waited after I formed. I thought I would be the only thing, for a long time. Eventually I learned how to replicate my own origins, to create others to wait with me in the shadows of the universe. The star’s Firstborn began to appear. My own children began working to help allow life to begin – and the Firstborn worked on the same end, always arriving after our own efforts did. I did not know what form the life we seeded would take when it finally blossomed – merely learned after eons of trial and error what conditions would cause life to arise in some form, what kinds of worlds would prove fertile. Some of it, I watched occur naturally – like the Firstborn or the Wanderers. Someday, when the stars grow cold and distant, and the universe spreads too thin to continue, it will be as it was, I think, before. What will be, was, what was, will be. The Firstborn spent so long to their eyes learning to explore their galaxy – to my eyes, they moved so fast, so rushed. They only saw their own galaxy, I saw far beyond.”_

Alicia gasped as she listened - this was the voice of the One-in-Waiting. The Firstborn - that must be what the Precursors called themselves - or maybe what the One-in-Waiting called them. Something that...this was definitely “sufficiently advanced alien.” It had helped guide evolution - probably more than the Precursors. For reasons entirely its own. 

“It saw far beyond our galaxy. Maybe it saw what would become the Eshrelia?”

Illias shook his head. “There’s more. We thought this was a Precursor signal when we found it - after all, they had ways of playing with gravity, and this was in their language.” The molluscoid linguist played the next section of the recording. 

“I have begun deciphering their ways of knowing – of speaking with one another. To the end of making sure they knew they are not alone, and having something that will speak back, I embedded ways – an errant signal, warping light, in the wounds gravity leaves in space. With luck, they will know me – and in time, come to understand the universe as I do.”

There was a long pause. Alicia spoke. “They...it...wanted to speak to the rest of the universe. The mantra...just a self-comforting statement, from a being so incomprehensibly old.”

Illias nodded. “Not just that. There’s...more.”

Taldir stiffened. “More? You said this was the full…”

“It is, and it isn’t. There’s evidence that the messages decayed after so long, that other beacons by black holes might contain more data. We’d have to check.”

Taldir grunted. “You want us to take that kind of risk again? Are you…” The Keld checked himself. “If you truly believe it will bring us closer to answers, I will consider it. Ywyn, do you believe you could accomplish such a feat twice?” Ywyn paused, then spoke.

“I would prefer not to have to find out. But if that is the mission set to us, and the orders set out, I can and I will. However, both Njos and Dolch say that the ship needs some heavy maintenence before we can attempt to put that kind of strain on it again. I will not take any such risk absent fully repairing her first.”

Taldir chuckled. “You wrong me if you think I’d suggest otherwise, Ivari. There’s a shipyard within a few weeks’ travel from here. We’ll repair and resupply there. In the meantime, everyone, dissemble and to the best of our abilities, let’s see what else is implied by what we just discovered.” 

Tony paused, and from the look on his face Alicia could tell that he was thinking back to the horror of the recordings they’d found in the Abandoned Sector. “Njos...would you say there is evidence here of singularity time distortions perhaps playing a part? Is there any way the One-in-Waiting knew about Kyriion before it happened? Or knew about the Eshrelia? For that matter, it’s widely accepted that the doomed Ivari ship that carried Kyriion to the Esharioc’s galaxy was pulled into a wormhole - do we know enough to know if it had anything to do with that or any way of knowing about it?”

Njos shook his head. “No. And for the record we actually have no evidence that the One-in-Waiting was capable of having any effect regarding wormholes at all.” Taldir glowered at the young human.

“Rather less important to speculate. It seems clear that if the One-in-Waiting was a being of dark matter, its coalescence was something it wanted to replicate - and did so by creating the Uncalled. Apparently it interfered in evolution of many of our species. For benevolent reasons, or at least benign ones. By its own admission it had no notion of what form life would ultimately take - it describes the process of one as trial and error, and acknowledges it had no way of knowing what would be created.” 

Alicia nodded. “But if all it wanted was company, badly enough that it did this just to communicate with the Precursors, why have its children slaughter them all? Why strike them back to the stone age? They seem to believe it was some form of punishment for overstepping some ancient boundaries. But they never said what those boundaries were. What did they do? Did they not know that the One-in-Waiting would talk? What…”

Taldir pounded the slender aluminum sheath of his vibrosaber on the deck of the _Searching Wing_. “Enough. Further speculation is likely to lead to confusion. If we can decipher anything further of that transmission, we may be able to find another beacon or attempt by this ancient being to communicate. And yes, in the interest of the Hegemony, I will say that if there is anything else we can investigate in regards to the Precursors, the One-in-Waiting or the Uncalled, we are obligated by our mission to do so. We make for ship repair and refuel first. Then we continue the mission. Understood?”

Alicia nodded. She was nervous, but she had signed up for this - seeking out secrets of other worlds, of the galaxy, and ferreting them out, whatever else they could. This was what she’d wanted to do. And now she looked at the likely outcome of that desire - more and more brushes with death. But after all.

That’s what her family had always been all about.


	17. Seeking Help

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ritia and her team go to find help in the search for an intelligence leaker

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Posted two days late because of other authorial obligations

Harriet Stilson was clutching her weapon nervously. Liok was quiet, but Ritia was still humming her usual song. The Vetinari sector was big, but the smuggler had contacted her occasional fling – with any luck, Ulen and his friend, Eritox, would be willing to assist them. Harriet was still unsure about the idea of tracking down someone like that with the help of a bounty hunter that their current pilot and shady friend was sleeping with, but at the same time, the Hegemonic military wasn’t having any luck, likely because whoever was leaking information was probably either highly placed or privy to enough intel that they could figure out when they were going to be more closely investigated. Which meant it was best to hunt them with unofficial resources.

Still, without a decent code-slicer Harriet had no idea how to begin finding the guy. They’d set up to meet with the bounty hunters during this rave where they wouldn’t be overheard – well, by anyone who wasn’t high off their tits on Hyperzine and spice. The music was violently and thoroughly obnoxious – then again it was what happened when someone had introduced the Dembra to the concept of heavy metal and they tended to really abuse their three jawed anatomy to really grind the notes out.

Harriet was starting to adjust, though Liok was clearly in more pain, the two of them sat down and pulled out a deck of cards for the music. There were a surprisingly small number of people interested in a game of three slice. There were a few people throwing darts, a few others getting shitfaced on booze and someone peddling kadis powder, but the bulk of people in the building were already either high or drunk. Harriet saw a pair of individuals starting up a brawl and idly considered breaking it up before forcing herself to look more like a common spice junky who wouldn’t care about such goings-on – though she kept an eye on it in case it escalated enough to put her at risk. 

Ritia was leaning back, her wings resting on the table, waiting and watching as Harriet and Liok started looking for gambling opportunities and chuckled. Military types never managed to look properly comfortable in these sorts of environments. They always latched onto one or two cover behaviors and got twitchy if said cover behaviors weren’t available. Ritia wasn’t worried – most people here were too high, drunk, or generally sensorially overloaded by the music and the lights to notice – for some species, the Tenebrae and the Palnt most notably, the overload was a form of intoxication, something that could induce a pleasant altered state of consciousness.

But to her sometime lover and his massive, steely green-scaled, shockaxe and shotgun wielding friend, the atmosphere merely gave an opportunity to meet up with old friends without being overheard or noticed – and occasionally to get high and take excited Ivari smugglers to bed. Though after the time with the Nathian party girl, the Tenebrac hooker and the human hiphop musician that having more than three different species in bed at once wasn’t the best idea, and had been very cautious about her own intoxication since that…thought it had been fun once.

Still, when Ritia saw Ulen walking in, slender, cyan form moving elegantly, the sinew and muscle seeming to go in all different directions while flowing so gracefully, coralstave strapped to his slender back with a few organic ties, carefully sculpted quasi-chitinous breastplate made form-fitting, her crest fluttered excitedly. The hulking Eritox came in behind him, weapons slung and massive shoulders mostly bare, clawed boots thudding on the ground as he walked, body seeming to roll forward. Liok had jumped into an unarmed prize fighting ring while Ritia wasn’t looking, and seemed to be holding his own pretty well against a large, muscular human with a cybernetic eye.

Ulen flopped gently into the chair opposite Ritia while Eritox sat between them. “So, what are you looking for, old friend?”

“I’m looking for someone in the Vetinari system. A code slicer, probably in the military or with contacts in it, who’s been leaking intel about the events aboard the Titan of Carrion.”

Ulen laughed, his self-sculped vocal chords making the sound melodious. “Leave it to me to ask a smuggler what she’s in the market for – always the rarest and hardest found of goods, even if she’s usually the one selling that sort of thing. So, you’re after the Specter of Doubt.”

Ritia’s indignant trill made Eritox cover his ears. “Specter of Doubt? What a pretentious name for someone who’s just dumping dangerous secrets to cause chaos.” 

Eritox shook his massive head. “Think, smuggler. According to the Specter’s followers, a lot could have been avoided had more people known about the Sclunter’s genetic drive to wage war. A lot more people could have moved coreward had the populace known about the Incursion sooner. For that matter, didn’t the Alliance split from the Federation because the Ivari kept too many secrets?”

Ritia blinked, then waved a wing in dismissal. “Not quite the same. The information he’s leaking is being used by radicals to incite serious violence against unarmed people. And while I can’t say everything, there is some indication that the information he’s leaking itself could be very dangerous – though we don’t know what parts of it, which is one of the reasons the Hegemony is trying to keep it under wraps until more is understood.”

Erotox growled. “I understand that. Ulen understands that. That doesn’t mean that on the surface, the secrecy isn’t somewhat hypocritical. Besides which, the bulk of the people who are on the mission to learn about the demise of the Precursors are relatives of big figures in the Hegemony – people who wouldn’t be willing to talk.”

Ritia rolled her eyes – a human mannerism that most predator-descended beings had picked up. “Ywyn Aethis is the mission pilot, I cannot emphasize enough how absurd that accusation actually is. Ever read Punkhawk?”

Ulen rolled his shoulders in good humor. “Right. Of course. That is a significant point – but the mission list is hardly publicized – he found the list, and he’s been making an effort to ensure the names most people see are….well, Lieutenant Taldir e’Klae, the Andala’s kids, a Nathian whose cousin is currently the tertiary successor for the office of Matriarch, the daughter of Hann Jaegar, Paenirc, who is close friends with Adisa Imari’s sister…not the best crew if you want a group of people who’ll be honest against the interests of their government, aside from the pilot. Oh, and of course they also have Illias Blorgi, who might well talk but is, much like his more famous cousin, Endirmas, a lot more interested in finding out a new and interesting thing than about deciding what happens to said information, and the biologist, engineer and physicist aboard are all very much psychologically unlikely to break the rules. Still, you make a fair point.”

Ritia nodded. “I knew that. Any idea where we might be able to find the guy?”

Ulen gave that particular wave of limb that would have been on par with a human shrug. “Possibly. A lead or two. However, the Vetinari sector isn’t small – we’d be best off looking around intelligence filtering bases – and we’re going to need a decent code slicer of our own.”

She nodded. “I don’t know one in the area – you guys?”

Eritox nodded. “Yes. It’s why we insisted on meeting here. There’s supposedly a Nathian who’s remarkably good with computers, and I have hopes that they’ll be willing to work with us to figure it out.”

“A Nathian? Working in this business?”

“I should note that Galri bounty hunters are hardly a common sight – and as far as I know, Tillap was found as a pup in the midst of one of the more…chaotic parts of the Marauder War by a few people who wanted to rescue him. He grew up with a family who were in the scene and as per how Nathians do things, he helped. He got his family out of debt to one of the crews around here and kept on going. Besides, how common is it to see an Imperial Keld working as a bodyguard for a smuggler?”

Liok’s ears pricked up and he looked vaguely offended until Ullen did that musical little laugh. “Take no offense, friend. You don’t have the outcast’s scar, and your posture is a little to rigid to be a proper criminal. You really must learn to relax. The human woman over there, brawling with that Tenebrac for money is slightly better. You keep formal company, Ritia.”

“I did get used to working with quality when I was Adisa’s insertion pilot, yes. So when is this perfect addition to our little collection of oddities going to be showing up?”

“Should be here in a few standard minutes.” Ritia leaned back, perched lightly on her chair. The time passed, the bounty hunters drank, Harriet won her fight and Liok got the prize money for having bet on her.

Eventually a Nathian with the strange fur discoloration that indicated Galri biovat-grown flesh grafts did arrive and sling himself into a stool with the four of them. “I hear you all had work for me? Regarding the specter of doubt?”

Ritia hesitated. “Yes. We’re looking for him.”

“You realize this will be a challenge, yes? That it will require time, money, and effort, and that I will help you only as far as I can from a netlinked terminal, correct?”

Ritia’s crest flared. “Yes, I understand. My own bodyguards and the bounty hunters are able to handle more than that.”

“Good. Then let us talk price.”


	18. Trails and Memories

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony and Alicia hear about their parents from Ywyn, the next phase of the mission is discussed

The refuel and repair had taken some time, and Tony and Alicia both had been frustrated with how busy Jessie had been repairing the machinery of the _Searching Wing_ – most of their time on the surface of one of the nearby planets had been spent away from her – though time with Illias, Oppa and Ywyn had been pleasant.

“Wait, mom and dad did WHAT in the Horsehead Nebula?”

Ywyn coughed. “They’d run dry on ammunition for their rail guns, shot off all their torpedoes, and the power cells for their plasma weaponry was running dry as well. So they flew straight through an ion storm with two squadrons of Esharioc fighters on their tails while the rest of the Tigers were fighting a little more conservatively, but we were getting our weight in kills with a lot less risk. They’d been more or less cut off, but they decided they had one more idea. Amelia called to them through the comms and told them that the storm would strip their shields and make them defenseless – but your dad called back and said, “We’re already offense-less, and if this trick works we won’t need defense.”

Alicia winced. That sounded like something her dad would say. “So what happened?”

“Well, they started flying in ways that not only encouraged their shields to be stripped by to actually fly apart inside the ion storm in a way that made it much worse, and kept moving around, more or less blind in the dust and gasses of the nebula, using the metal of their own ships and the galvanic backblast of their thrusters to amplify the storm until the Esharioc were well and truly lost – mind you, the enemy weapons and shields weren’t touched by the ion storm. So when Jake and Callie blasted out, lightning trailing off their wingtips and laughing mad in the comms again, and no Esharioc made it out of the nebula – I heard the captain whisper, “holy shit, they’ve still got it. After all these years.”

Tony was staring, impressed. “I wish they’d told us more about the lives they had. They never talked about it, any of the wars they fought – not in detail. Though we were there for the raid on Haven. As little kids who happened to be in the cockpits when the attack came.”

Ywyn’s crest fluttered. “Why were you in the cockpits when that happened?”

“They said they wanted to show us what it was like to fly. But then the attack came, and they realized they couldn’t get us to a shelter before the enemy bombers would have reached it.”

A quiet sob caught in Alicia’s throat – one that had been building for her since they got the messages from the family on Tildas. Jake and Callie were aging, and it had been two years since this mission had started – since they’d seen their family last. Alicia knew she’d never hear a lot of the stories her parents had left to tell. Which probably meant that Jake and Callie’s stories of the missions they’d had alone for all those years before the squadron reformed would probably vanish with them, outside the collection written by Endirmas. But at this point, she wanted the mission over so she could see her mom and dad again before they…

***

It had been a few days since they’d gone back to space, the _Searching Wing_ having been refueled and repaired. Alicia’s concerns hadn’t abated, but her parents were tough and they were still alive after all these years. She and Tony were due for leave in a few months, and they were going to spend time with their parents if possible.

They didn’t feel the joy their parents had soaring through outer space, but they were somewhat looking forward to the other part of this journey. Finding more words of either the dead race that had proceeded them or the dead godlike entity that had seeded the galaxy with life. Ywyn was trilling slightly under her breath in the cockpit, and Taldir was purring as Oppa and Illias chatted with him. For the time being, the Searching Wing would be a home in the Nathian sense – family were the people who went through anything and everything with you, who you could share almost anything with, and all of them, even the prickly Keldebrair lieutenant, were helpful and supportive people. 

Taldir gathered them around. “Our next mission is back to Gravalax – we’re looking for more information about where the Precursors might have built transmitters that could have wound up inside a black hole where the One in Waiting might communicate. If we find them, we’ll follow the trail and see where we can pick up the next horizon signal fragment.” He glanced around the room, taking in the grim acceptance of that statement. The transmissions from the One-in-Waiting had been codenamed “Horizon Signals” in mission logs. Taldir continued. “If we don’t find any such clue regarding where to pick up the trail, we’re going to be taking a real risk – we go aboard one of the ancient hulks, preferably not the _Titan of Carrion_ , and find out anything we can regarding further communications or informational sources.”

Alicia blinked. “Wait, what!? We’re going on a hulk if we can’t get information from a relic world? Are you insane?”

“Discipline, Andala.” His ears flicked, indicating he wasn’t in a terrible mood, though Paenirc seemed aggravated at the higher volume – albeit more so at the suggested mission.

“Right. Forgive my sister.” Tony cleared his throat. “Are you insane, sir?”

Taldir gave a slight grin, as though he had spotted a particularly delicious canary. “No. We were issued a mission that we swore to fulfill. In addition, those who landed aboard the _Titan of Carrion_ went armed. We will be doing no such thing – if we must board one of the ancient hulks, Illias will prepare a greeting in the language of the Precursors which we shall all scream at the top of our lungs, declaring that we mean no harm and simply want to learn. If that does not work, we do have the option of retreat – and per tradition, I will be first in, last out. As befits a Keld in leadership.”

That was not as reassuring as it was intended to be, Alicia reflected, but there was no point in explaining why. The young Andala thought for a bit. She didn’t enjoy the thought of going boots-down onto one of the relic worlds, but she’d accept it to find more answers about the very origin of life in the galaxy, possibly the universe. “So how far off are we from Gravalax?”

“Two weeks. And there’s another black hole en route, Lieutenant. Should we attempt to get near to see if we can pick up anything? Just see if there might be a horizon signal fragment there?”

Taldir paused and considered. “Get within the range where we’d be likely to if it was there – do not approach the event horizon. If we have any evidence of a horizon signal fragment, those orders will change.”

Ywyn replied in the affirmative as the _Searching Wing_ continued, and Jessie, fresh out of the systems room, was swearing. “What’s the LT thinking? Go aboard a Precursor hulk? We don’t even know what the nature of the temporal anomaly aboard those might be – the records we got of the op on the Titan of Carrion indicates some real risk. And Njos and I have no idea how to counter any of that.”

Tony groaned. “Time warp bullshit with the genocidal children of a dead god on a creepy wreck built by a dead race drifting endlessly through the void. Join the Explorers, see the galaxy, learn the truth. I gotta tell you sis, in the time since we enlisted, I’ve been mugged on an urbworld on leave, lost my entire paycheck gambling more than zero times, walked in a biosuit through the ashes of billions of people murdered by a sapient plague, run from a giant murder toad, and seen some well and truly amazing sights but I think it’s safe to say that following our parents’ footsteps in trying to see the galaxy might have been a mistake.”

Alicia had to agree a little. But all the same. “We have seen a lot of beautiful things though. Gotten to make our own name. And do you remember, when we graduated from the Fleet Academy, got our pins and badges, remember how proud mom and dad were?”

Tony nodded, little tears forming in the corners of his eyes. “They were never afraid of anything.”

Ywyn chuckled, quietly and sadly. “Yes they were. At least by the time I served with them. They ever tell you where your names came from?”

Alicia looked at her, surprised. “No, but I can guess from reading Blorgi’s book we were named after their old squadronmates during the Dominion War. Why?”

“Because the original Tiger Squadron – the one formed during the Dominion War, when my neglectful asshole of father was Archon,” at this, Taldir’s lip curled back from his teeth – the Keldebriar had executed Ywyn’s father for his deceptions during that war, deceptions that had resulted in thousands of innocent Palnt and Galri being killed. It had been among their conditions to join the Federation that he face justice. Ywyn waved a wing. “Yes, that one, Lieutenant. Anyway, Andalas. The original Tony and Alicia weren’t just squadron mates, they were your parents’ XOs, helped keep the squadron together. And they were shot down during the final battle of that war. Your parents told me, or more accurately, Captain Amelia, I was just in the room as Amelia’s XO – that they named you partly to honor their friends, and partly because they needed something to remember to anchor themselves. They’d lost their anchor, they said, when the first Squadron died, they became reckless. Amelia had to chew them out and call them out properly during the Alliance-Federation war before they snapped out of it, and when Callie became pregnant with a girl, they decided to name you something that would remind them that they had a duty to more than just their own crippling adrenaline addiction – one that they were looking forward to resuming through the entire Incursion.”

Alicia took that in, thinking over the number of times her parents had cited the things they’d seen in war as the main reason they were happy she and Tony had joined the Surveyors and Explorers as their branch for their service to the Terran Republic, instead of the military. 

“So…all this time. Me and Tony were…”

“After Amelia slapped sense into them about their reckless bullshit and lack of regard for their own lives – and just about everyone else’s – you were their anchor. You were the thing that kept them from embracing the madness they’d been dancing at the edge of for so, so long – since they lost your namesakes, at least. Possibly before that.”

Tony had known some of that, and deduced that they’d been named for their parents’ old squadron-mates, after reading Blorgi’s record of their adventures. He’d known that his parents were considered a little insane, but to know that they were so reckless that…he and his sister were the only things that had kept them from…

“Before they…” he trailed off. “Before they go, Alicia. We have to talk to them. Learn about their story. Not just what they told Blorgi.”

Alicia nodded. Oppa barked. “I don’t know. They loved you. They turned aside their worst nature because they loved you – what more do you need?”

A Nathian response. But Ywyn could see, as could Taldir, that just like their parents – even if Tony and Alicia were not yet aware of that parallel – the young Andalas were struggling with their nature, deciding if they were human or Nathian.


	19. Tracking Ghosts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ritia and Tumin figure out the rest of their plan to engage with and get information out of the Ghost of Sparta.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No you're not nuts, there was a hiatus last week due to the blackout movement. Oh, and going to say this: literally no one but Jaegar in the original series was white, and sci fi has always been a political genre, so if you're one of those "keep politics out of sci-fi" people, sincerely go suck start a railgun.

The Nathian hacker, Tumin, wound up being a superb resource. He quickly locked into the IFF signal of the _Ghost of Sparta_ and began directing Ritia’s ship towards it. When the former smuggler asked, he shook his head.

“Don’t know where the Specter is directly. But I intercepted a few messages some time ago that indicated he was working with other “ghosts” in the underworld. It was one way, and I was able to backtrack it to these pirates. They trade high value commodity a lot – and in this day and age, what could be more valuable than information?” Ritia paused – maybe instead of hunting down the Specter she should have been trying to get in on the business. No, no. I left that kind of shit behind me a long time ago. Too much risk, too much collateral damage, not enough reward. Still, Ritia wondered.

“The _Ghost of Sparta_ is a pirate cruiser – mostly about stealing from trade haulers and selling what they buy, gun running, drug trading – hear rumors it was a slaver at one point but the Navy would have vaped them by now if that were true. They’re sleazy fucks but they’ll work with people like us if they see it’s in their best interests.”

“And how do we do that?”

“You just bought a big payload of weapons, right?” That was Ulen, and Ritia nodded.

“So load some charges onto them. Odds are the Spartans will take us prisoner if our ship approaches theirs, but the kind of ordinance you just got will definitely ruin their day – and ruin that pretty renegade strike craft of theirs. You could take them hostage in exchange for fair pay, and while you do that, we load all sorts of bugs onto the equipment we sell them – they’ll load it into their systems and we’ll have tracking capability. Yes?”

Tumin nodded. “That could work, yes. But the Spartans also might just shoot us. Their captain is known to have a short fuse and a real willingness to die over pride – I am not entirely certain such a gamble would be for the best.”

Eritox shrugged his massive shoulders. “They’re criminals, but they’re not stupid. They wouldn’t risk any such incident with a dead man’s switch. The concern there is more that they’d simply detect anything we planted on them and the risk would be for naught.”

Ritia stood up. “Any other ideas?”

“Take it a step further. They might well make use of slaves aboard the ship even if they don’t sell them. Maybe Tumin can get a shot at one of their terminals that way?” Ulen shook his head even as Liok and Harriet tensed. 

“So are we looking for the pirates to follow them to the Specter or are we offering them an arrangement for them to betray the Specter? These are different matters, and if they have ever dealt in slaves, I cannot, even undercover, permit the latter under imperial codes.” Liok’s voice came out slowly, but with a menacing growl underneath that indicated the bloody roar of a Keld would be coming out shortly if pressed on the point. 

Harriet waved a hand. “Following, I think. Though it would not go amiss with me to simply deal with the pirates after they’ve outlived their utility either way - if only so that Ritia and her friends could get a decent payday and Liok and I might finally get promoted.”

Tumin let out a quick bark of laughter, the sound a bit mocking. “No, no. I would enjoy the payday, but the risk of your true quarry slipping your nets and escaping again, this time without a lead to his whereabouts. As to the Keld’s issue - emotion aside, you are not in the space of the Keldebrair Empire. This sector is directly under Hegemonic rule - only laws of the Hegemony of Free Worlds are binding here. And the Specter has the potential of doing far greater harm than the _Ghost of Sparta_ , at least for now. Left unchecked, he will reveal more information about the Precursors and the Uncalled - and we still suspect that the Uncalled’s assaults are drawn by forbidden knowledge of the Precursors, yes?”

That thought effectively chilled the discussion. The small team hadn’t gotten full reads on what was occurring - only enough to know the stakes. Still, Harriet was suspicious - how did Tumin know?

When she voiced as much, the Nathian cyborg shrugged. “Too much chatter on those circles on the net to avoid it, truth be known. It’s well contained, but I had suspicions that someone would come by looking for bounty on the Specter - and I had to get some idea of what was at stake before I was willing to decide if I’d help him vanish or assist those trying to catch him.” 

Liok tensed slightly. “Does that mean you’d have worked against us had you-”

“Yes. I am under no particular debt to the Hegemony, nor hold any obligation to them. My life has been one of being cared for by the underworld, and I’ve lost no small number of adoptive clanmates in crime wars that the Hegemony’s troops never seemed to bother dealing with until the “innocent” outside the crime rings became endangered. The Hegemony has my assistance in this matter because their failure has dire consequences for the adoptive family I possess, and I will go to great lengths to preserve them. But I care little for government secrets without reason - had the Specter’s crusade for truth not put innocents in danger I’d have helped him become more ghostly yet when your best experts attempted to trace him. People compare my skill to that of Brimas Blorgi - a valiant woman who died thirty years ago in orbit above Bastion, considered without peer as a code slicer in her day. You’d never have slipped through my smokescreens.” Ritia’s crest fluttered and she took a sip of cordial - a quiet toast to a long dead friend. A beat pause and Tumin added. “Further, the Specter’s arrogance loosed a piece of racial violence that cost me family - some of the Eshrelia killed by the terrorists were close with me.” 

Tumin now spoke with a slight growl and hiss under the words, a viciousness contorting his face that Harriet had only seen on Nathian faces in photos - and even then, only once, when someone had happened to get a photograph of Dalafer’s time on the battlefields of the Marauder War. “Nathians know no debts of death and blood, but I’m of the Jelair Consortium by adoption, and those debts are paid by this family as all others are - in kind, and in full. Now, if you have no further questions, I need access to a ship’s terminal, preferably a ship with a fairly extreme scanner range. The Talon of Justice has such a scanner - Ulen, Eritox, I presume I may use this?”

Eritox nodded, and followed the diminutive code slicer back to his ship. Ritia drained the last of the nectar she’d ordered - a cordial, one slightly intoxicating to the Ivari, after holding it aloft as a jesting toast. “To working together again. Hopefully these pirates have something useful to go on. And Liok? Harriet? If you promise to make sure we get the Specter first, I promise we can do something that will make the Spartans’ lives a lot harder.”

That seemed to boost morale and, after finishing her glass, Ritia and her team moved back to the Laughing Kree, and waited to be contacted.

And waited. At one point Ritia went over to the Talon of Justice to see what was taking so long, as Harriet and Liok started sparring. Tumin was still working, so she grabbed Ulen by one of his sleekly muscular limbs and told him to show her his quarters.

After that uniquely lovely experience the two emerged to find Tumin looking smugly at the terminal and tossed a dataslate at Ulen - “Found them. Or at least, found their IFF - if the Laughing Kree wants to lock to this one, you can pursue the Ghost of Sparta as far as you’ll need to, both of you, together, and be able to set a trap.”

Eritox shook his head. “If you can get into their comms so we know where their next attempts at attacks, jobs or general motions might be going, it would make it much easier to set an ambush.”

Tumin gave a bark. “Agreed. Would need to be closer - they use a cyclic data cloud encryption for internal comms, one that allows them to figure out pretty rapidly if someone’s far away when attempting to contact them or listen - I’d need to be closer to set up any such data siphon in a way that would not be detected. But if you can do that, then yes, I can compromise their comms.”

There was a pause. Then Ritia spoke. “Right then. Come on my ship - it’s better at not being noticed, and as close as I am with both Eritox and Ulen, its no secret that I’m the better stealth pilot. We’ll get you close and get some data. Would you boys kindly send the tracking information he just secured to me?” She gestured for Tumin to follow her back to the Kree.

Both the _Talon_ and _Kree_ were ready for takeoff not long after, the _Ghost of Sparta_ having been located in a system not far away - the traces of an idea formed in Ritia’s mind. The Spartans might just take the weapons from them if they were caught - after all, the Spartans and the Zhans were about to have a big turf war, and as Ritia thought about it she had claimed to be buying the gear for the Zhans…

Maybe the Spartans felt like being a little reckless as well. As the ships lifted into orbit, Ritia thought about the risks she was taking, risks she was certain her lost friends, Shaed, Adisa, Prian, would be proud of her for taking for the innocent. Despite the time she’d spent protesting that she was a smuggler with few attachments, she still missed them – one of the reasons she liked working with Liok and Harriet was how much they reminded her of lost friends.

Still, as one of the few still living who’d worked with Brimas Blorgi, she wondered what the Vulpexi would have thought of Tumin’s boasting. She just hoped he was as good as he claimed - he’d better be, to compare himself to Brimas.


	20. Return to a Silent World

Alicia’s boots hit the ground on Gravalax again with a strangely unechoed thud, which seemed fitting – this world was so eerily silent after its ancient inhabitants had died that it would have seemed odd to even get a normal echo. The rest of the team were on the ground and Taldir was already signaling them to start moving towards the research stations they’d been through last time they’d been on the ground here. The Keld had been strict with orders regarding weapons – they were still attempting to avoid any run-ins with the Uncalled, and weapons would be worthless in the event that they showed up anyway. 

The fear of the Uncalled wasn’t strong in Alicia’s head. She was more worried that they wouldn’t find the answers they needed – she wanted to know more of the story of the One-in-Waiting. That kind of knowledge, that kind of story, told by a dying god, or at least, godlike being…no sane person would pass up the chance to hear something like that. Alicia was moving towards the research facility that Taldir had looked at last time – she’d been too busy in the biolabs where the Precursors had examined the One-in-Waiting’s work and tried to spread creations of their own like it. She thought back and remembered with a smile that only a year ago the idea that human evolution might have been tampered with was the most mind bending thing she had learned. Since then, she’d heard the voice of a dying god talk about its experiences near the beginning of the universe and life as Alicia could conceive of it.

Paenirc was being sweet lately – less shy, less anxious, more willing to speak his mind. He’d stayed close to Taldir, but he was becoming more and more friendly with the rest of the crew. Jessie was talking with Dolch and Njos about the possibilities of finding a safe way to imitate what the Precursors had clearly done with dark matter tech – something that wouldn’t draw power from the lifeblood of the Uncalled or their mysterious progenitor. Njos was already shaking his head. “No, kid. Not in your lifetime – though you humans don’t live as long as you could, yet.”

Jessie paused. “Hey, most of us are going to be living about a century and a half these days, and with a few more generations of health modifications and supplements given by the Galri we’ll probably last up to a hundred standard years – just under three hundred Earth years.”

“Right, I apologize.” Dolch rumbled softly as Alicia flinched at the reminder of her own parents’ imminent mortality and Tony met her eyes, nervously. “It’s well outside mine. If Ywyn ever reproduced, it would be outside her child’s likely lifespan – and her grandchild’s as well. We’re a long way away from being anywhere near…this.” 

Njos followed the Dembra’s lead. “Right, apologies. But as Dolch was saying…” the Palnt gestured around. “We’re a long way off. And maybe that’s for the best. Maybe given enough time, the average person will realize this isn’t needed to have good lives in this galaxy.”

Alicia chuckled. The Hegemony now claimed over a third of the galaxy – thousands of planets, just under a trillion beings living, working and existing within it. More species seemed to become part of the Hegemony every day, most of them living prosperously away from the Abandoned Stars. The Terraforming Corps made more and more formerly barren worlds livable using molecular recombination, thermal alterations, and so much else. Venus had been declared ready a standard year prior, and now had a few million people living happily on what was once a toxic, superheated and lifeless ball, most of them Dembra as it was still brutally hot. Maybe they didn’t need Precursor tech, but it would be nice to understand what the architects of much of the modern galaxy’s state of being had been doing, how they’d done it, or why they’d seemed to actively oppose the One-in-Waiting – even before the Uncalled had started angering the Precursors with retaliation for their unknown encroachment on things they weren’t supposed to tamper with.

Or maybe the retaliation had occurred because the Precursors had known, after the One-in-Waiting had found a way to communicate. There had to be an easier way to know for certain. One Jessie hoped to find by tracking the Horizon Signal.

The research facility contained few clues regarding the celestial disaster of the Uncalled – very little they hadn’t already analyzed, anyway. There were a few systems in place, observational facilities, listening posts. “Illias, Njos, get through this. Iolin, if you and Oppa want, go back to the biolab and see if there’s anything we missed. I doubt it, but there’s no harm in checking, to find as much as we can about the origins of life that we can learn from the Precursors. Keep your comm channel totally open – we don’t want to linger here longer than we have to.” Oppa nodded and the two took off. 

“Andalas, going to want you with us to sweep out the facility – you too, Jaegar. This search has to be thorough, and I want human eyes on the matter. Your people have a talent for thinking up and creating possibilities other species aren’t quite mad enough to see. And I need that for this kind of thing. We’re looking for coordinates, transmissions from the listening devices, any list of locations of said listening devices.”

The facility was as eerie as Taldir and Paenirc remembered it. Silent. Not even the machines sounded – the technology of the Precursors was remarkable and perpetually functional, but even before the collapse of their civilization their tech must have run as silently as its masters stayed now. Illias’s tapping on his data-slate as he began translating the maps of the facility were the only sounds for a moment, save for the nervous breathing of the small team within the building. Even that was minimal, though Alicia could have sworn she felt her own heart pounding in her ears. Tony’s hands were shaking, but he felt them steadied by a few reaching tendrils and looked over to see Paenirc. 

“Nothing bad happened last time we were here. It should be fine.”

The silence dragged on until Illias spoke. “I have what we need. Three more listening posts to go find. The nearest one is only a week away.”

Taldir nodded. “Search the area really quick, just to see if anyone has any observational notes.”

Alicia did so, scrabbling through the building to find anything that might be useful until Tony called out. “There’s a loose panel here. I’m going to see if I can pry it loose.” She heard the click of his knife against the tile and the rasping as something was pried open. Taldir paused, then asked, “Andala, why would a proper research facility hide any data under floorboards?”

“Maybe an inspection was coming up and certain projects were supposed to be abandoned? Or maybe they just wanted to avoid something leaking to the media that would alarm the general public? It’s not like there’s a shortage of reasons people might hide things in a comparatively low-tech way, Lieutenant. Sir.” There was a bit more scrabbling and then Tony spoke again.

“Yeah, there’s data keys of some kind. Not sure why they’d hide them, sir, but they definitely did. My sister’s better at scoping that sort of question than I am.”

Taldir’s grin was vaguely predatory. “Jaegar, could you double check to see if there are any other tiles that might have things hidden? 

Jessie pulled out a few quick tools to check if there were any hollow compartments before shaking her head in the negative. “Worth checking, I suppose. Alright, return to the ship.”

“What do they say?”

Tony handed them to Illias in answer. The team started moving back to the ship as the Vulpexi worked on the answer. When they re-boarded the Searching Wing, Illias quickly sat down to his computer.

“Just research notes. I’ll have them translated in an hour.”

There wasn’t much to do in that hour beyond reflect. Iolan and Oppa had found a few more samples in the biolabs that they’d documented and scanned into the general databases to see if they could be crossmatched with paleontological records of anything else in the galaxy, but the real excitement came when Illias was done translating and flashed the translation onto their datapads.

_ “Date 102-20-12M. Contact with the Elder in the black hole seems to have been established. It seems to be engaging indirectly with the communication equipment, attempting to discern our language – to this purpose we have sent music, numbers, and literature into the Event Communicators.” _

_ “Date 102-28-12M. Elder has assimilated language. Seems to be indicating desire for cooperation. Gives a series of numbers, seem to be star coordinates of some kind.” _

Illias paused. “There were a lot that were too corrupted to translate. This is the next one.”

_ “Date 192-02-12M. Contact with species Elder has been involved with is thus far underwhelming. They haven’t evolved sentience yet, though most of them seem to have the genetic triggers required to do so eventually. Is the Elder simply unaware of how time progresses for the rest of us?” _

_ “Date 193-07-12M. Contact continues. Media still unaware, by order of government, of interaction with Elder. Many of them still see the Elder as a god, it would be foolhardy to tell them that it’s just the oldest living being in existence.” _

Alicia snorted. “Just.” The Precursors were fools. It guided the evolution of a lot of worlds. That’s a lot more than just being ancient.”

The recordings continued, though the next one was dated a ways later.

_ “Date 193-09-12M Keeping recordings hidden because of the occasional inspection. Higher ups want to be careful. But we’re starting to hear rumors from the physics department that they think they understand the nature of the Elder. Maybe they’ll be able to create something like it, or figure out the truth behind all its power. Maybe we could evolve like the Elder did.” _

_ “Date 209-14-12M. Experiments proceed at a rapid pace regarding dark matter and dark energy. The average person now knows the nature of their god. And most of them are excited to study it. To imitate it. To reach the ideal of a species. A new name as caught on for the Elder. The One-in-Waiting. It waits for equals to join it in the void above time and space. Might be presumptuous, but we’re learning not just how to imitate what our god says but what it is. And that’s bound to make some people giddy.” _

That wasn’t the end, though Alicia was already wincing at the arrogance. 

_ “Date 210-11-12M. We’ve hit a dead end on dark matter informed forced evolution. Almost doesn’t matter. The number of other things we’ve learned, about how to manipulate matter, energy. Beyond anything we’d ever dreamed. We have unlimited energy, now. Truly unlimited. Materials science we thought was impossible only a few years ago. The communications systems with the One-in-Waiting are picking up more and more data. Seems to be getting frantic. Warning us to turn back. It warns of consequences, but I have no idea what even it could do.” _

_ “Date 211-3-12M. We are under attack. Our scientists, our top ones, keep dying. Same way every time – crushed by gravitic anomaly. Like they’d gotten too close to a singularity. We’re looking into it, but we can’t detect much beyond our own tech going strangely haywire. But something’s hunting us. The more superstitious claim the consequences of the Elder, but I’m not so sure.” _

Alicia shuddered. “The One in Waiting. It tried to warn them. And they didn’t listen. So the Uncalled came.”

Taldir nodded. “But only to kill the most brazen interlopers, at first. I wonder what changed.”

Alicia couldn’t shake the feeling that if they kept at this long enough, they’d learn exactly the line that had been crossed.


	21. Renegade Strike Cruiser

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ritia and her team meet with the pirates aboard the renegade strike cruiser, Ghost of Sparta.

Tumin scoffed a bit. “Well, there’s a spot of bright news.”

Ritia glanced over at the furry little cyborg. “What?”

“I intercepted a bit of data from the Navy – you know those new dreadnoughts? The paramount-class? One of the first ones, _Invictus_ , and its attached battlegroup is going to be within almost immediate interception range of the _Ghost of Sparta_ – that’s some powerful negotiating leverage right there. Something to consider dropping during the negotiations, at least. I don’t care how brazen the Spartans are, or how skilled – they’ll get owned if they try to go up against a proper Naval battlegroup.”

Harriet grinned. “That is convenient.”

Ritia shook her head. “No it isn’t. They’d have to have some evidence we weren’t simply making up where the patrol was before they were willing to trade – and there’s precious little evidence we could provide them without straight up telling them where the patrol was, making the trade of information moot.”

That quelled the human’s good mood, though from the excited lashing of tail Liok was just as happy. “Is there perhaps an option to simply have Tumin falsify a route that would look convincing, then perhaps retreat? Set them up for capture so they can’t stab us in the back later?” The idea had its appeal, and Ritia thought about it, before looking to Tumin.

The Nathian gangster shrugged. “Probably could. Need a few hours if you want me to do it though.” Ritia thought about it further. She didn’t love the idea of double crossing another player in the assorted games of intrigue and black market, but the Spartans had definitely screwed her over a time or two. Most of her reluctance to cross the Spartans came from the risk of retribution – and didn’t matter how tough they were, they’d lose to any naval battlegroup – especially the _Invictus_. Supposedly Commander Silvanus Hanes commanded that one and he’d studied directly under Shiloh Hendrix. On second thought. The Spartans had escaped tricky situations before, and she had no desire to deal with it if they somehow escaped that. “On second thought, Tumin. Don’t. Just the tracking.”

She contacted the _Talon of Justice_. “ _Talon_ , this is _Kree_. Tumin says he’s intercepted the location of the battle group around Paramount Dreadnought _Invictus_. We’re going to be using that as a form of leverage against the Spartans.”

Ulen’s voice came back through the comms. “Understood, we will maintain the same distance we have. Are we contacting the Spartans or attempting to board with them for negotiations?”

Ritia had been weighing that back and forth for several days, but she had come to her conclusion. “We’ll sell them the guns we have, all of which are for infantry combat, not space, for information. We’ll mention the navigational data to them as a form of insurance – we’ll give it to them after we leave and get out of their range. It’ll keep them from attacking us. Especially if we imply that we have fail-safes rigged into the armament to prevent anyone from double crossing us. We trade arms for information, and we trade naval positional data for an easy exit.”

Eritox’s voice came back through the LENS emitter. “Understood. Would you like us to accompany you aboard the _Ghost of Sparta_?”

“Negative. _Laughing Kree_ will approach alone.”

The ships were drawing ever closer to the larger craft, the infamous renegade strike cruiser _Ghost of Sparta_. Ritia quietly prayed that her trick would work as Tumin said, quietly. “I have their internal comms bugged now, smuggler. And I have the data we need.”

Ritia nodded. “Harriet, Liok, arm yourselves. Eritox, Ulen, be ready to bail us out.”

Everyone signaled affirmative. Ritia turned to Tumin. “Hail them.”

There was a long pause as Tumin accessed the communications channel, then beckoned her over to address them. “This is Laughing Kree, a smuggling vessel. We have armament and naval navigational data, and are willing to trade.”

“Ghost of Sparta to Laughing Kree. We read. What are you looking to trade for?” Tumin looked to Ritia as the voice came back through the LENS console.

“Information, and credits.” Ritia took the console. “This is the captain of the Kree. We have a lot of personal weaponry, railguns, baneslayer rifles, flamers, plasma rifles, few shredders. Thousands of units of ammunition, and about three hundred hand grenades. We’re asking for twelve thousand credits for those. Yes, standard precautions will be taken, with a dead hand switch, so don’t get any ideas of simply taking it.”

An ominous chuckle from the other end of the LENS, and then, “I’d expect nothing less from a ship that has lasted this long in this business. We’ll drop our cloaking and let you dock – be warned. Insurance detonators will be accepted as fair in this business – trackers will get you shot, regardless of risk.”

Ritia tried to sound as nonchalant as possible. “Understood.” She disconnected the comms as the magnetic docking point on the _Ghost of Sparta_ began opening, and the ship became visible on the normal viewscreen. She turned to Tumin. “Just so I know, how are the detonators set up? And how are the trackers done?”

“Clever system I devised myself. I’ll transmit the disarming code to the failsafes, and in the transmission I’ll put in a worm that’ll let us intercept their comms. We can trade the naval data for rumor if they’re interested.”

Ritia’s crest fluttered with excitement. “That makes sense. Good work. Liok, Harriet, be ready to fight if there’s trouble but know that there isn’t likely to be. And if there is, we’re fucked, so please don’t start it.”

The _Laughing Kree_ slowly drew up to the _Ghost of Sparta_ , and Ritia was glad to note that the _Talon of Justice_ was nearby, with a long-range “ion storm” torpedo loaded that would blind the _Ghost_ if they needed to escape in a hurry. Ritia slowly docked her ship with the _Ghost_ , and began waiting for the Spartans to step aboard, holding the detonator for the “insurance” charges.

The Spartans to come aboard were a mixed group – some human, some Vulpexi, an Exile Keld, a Palnt, and a Tyrisian. They had a few Dembra with them. One of them – a female Vulpexi – spoke first. “Let us see the merchandise before we pay for it. We have been swindled before.”

Ritia nodded – that was a standard demand, and she’d have respected them less for not making it. They went below to take a good look at the weapons, and the Dembra nodded approvingly after about twenty minutes of examination. “They are good quality, sir. The smuggler is not trying to swindle us regarding that, or the quantity of weapons and munitions here.”

The man turned to the Palnt. “Check it over for me – make sure there are no bugs on it.” The Palnt did so. “Nope. Quite a lot of explosive ordinance that would ruin our hull if it went off wired up though – presumably to the detonator the Ivari is holding.” The captain looked at her.

“And am I to assume that we are permitted use of the explosives as well, once disarmed?”

Ritia let out a little trill of laughter. “That is a fair assumption, yes. I’ll have no use for them as more than insurance with this shipment, after all.” The pirate smirked.

“How very agreeable. I have faith in my crew’s assessment, if they said you weren’t lying about quality or quantity of weapons, I’m willing to give you your asking price. Twelve thousand credits. And you said you had information that you wanted to trade for other information, as well.”

Ritia nodded, feeling tense. “I have a friend who’s looking for the Specter of Doubt, and he’s passing me some money to get information for him. We hear you guys had some interaction with the Specter, was wondering if you’d be willing to give me information for that in exchange for some data my computer specialist found?”

The Spartan looked at her, cautiously. “What kind of information?”

“Location of a major naval battlegroup you may want to avoid, as well as its current vector.”

The pirate’s expression didn’t change, but Ritia got the distinct feeling she’d gotten his attention. The Vulpexi woman who’d come aboard had begun signalling the rest of her crew to help load the weaponry over to the _Ghost_ , and she began transferring the money to Ritia’s accounts.

“Alright. The Specter of Doubt isn’t a single person, it’s a title taken by top tier code slicers who don’t trust the Hegemony. The current one has some connections to one of the big crime families in the Vetenari sector, apparently owed one of the bosses something. Supposedly got pissed after the race riots, like they weren’t really an intended effect. And your information?” He was holding something back, but that was still useful.

Ritia kept her own face from showing any expression, and forced her crest not to raise. That did sound like something she could maybe ask Tumin about – or that he should have some notion, since he was connected with the same mafia groups. “Thank you. As to mine. You know that new model of dreadnought? The Paramount Class? And all the tracking upgrades, and cloaking countermeasures it has by contrast to the old titan-class? The first one, _Invictus_ , and its battlegroup are in this sector. Commanded by Shiloh Hendrix’s understudy, Hanes. Tumin, if you’d be so good as to transfer that?”

The pirate captain watched the Nathian slicer work without any expression before nodding at the notification on his dataslate. His eyebrows went up a fraction of a centimeter. “Interesting. That could have been difficult for us if we hadn’t been warned. Watch your back, smuggler.”

“And you yours, pirate.”

The _Kree_ undocked from the _Sparta_ and moved away. Ritia was left thinking that the pirate captain had meant something more by that than the usual farewell between those who lived on the wrong side of the law. “ _Talon_ , this is _Kree_. We’re clear. Let’s take off and rendezvous at the agreed on location. We have some questions to consider.” An idea tickled the back of her head about Tumin. An ominous one.

The _Talon_ replied in Ulen’s voice. “Understood. Tell us what we’ve found out.” Tumin glanced over. “Worm online, if you’re wondering. The explosives are disarmed.” Ritia signaled the Spartans to inform them that the charges were offline, and the _Laughing Kree_ got underway.


	22. Tempest Sector

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Galactic geography is dealt with as another fragment of the Horizon Signal is pursued and recovered. For the record, this is based on a real part of our galaxy - I pester my physics major friend a lot and he says the only reason I haven't gotten an impromptu colonoscopy about the space dogfights is that he is also a star wars fan.

The next black hole to be approached on the long journey was far from Hegemonic space – an area that hadn’t been explored, and due to the amount of nebulae, high-gamma-output stars, neutron star, pulsars, and any number of other things that made this region of the galaxy effectively unlivable – even traveling it took a good quality ship like the _Searching Wing_. Called the Tempest Sector for the ion storms that flailed the endless void, the location of the next event horizon to be straddled had caused no end of consternation among the crew of the Searching Wing. Alicia couldn’t hide her anxiety, though she was eager to see what else the team could learn from the next fragment of the Horizon Signal once it was recovered. There was no looking out portholes – the transparent alloys made in Dembra forges had been rendered fully opaque and shielded to keep out the radiation in the region.

Ywyn was getting nervous – there were a lot of things thrown off intended function by the radiation in this region – Illias was more than capable of cleaning up signal interference, but Njos, Jessie, and Dolch could only do so much to keep the instruments functioning as near flawlessly as they could. Black hole research in this region had never been attempted before, and having looked at the odds Alicia was fairly sure that was because doing so would be completely and utterly fucking insane if someone had any better options. Taldir’s icy calm was something reassuring, at least, but then, the Keld officer was always more outwardly calm when he was terrified – him showing fear would have actually been more reassuring. Alicia still forced herself not to panic – Tony was drinking enough of his liquor ration already.

Ywyn’s easy manner of late had tightened – hell, the whole crew had become considerably more tense, and requiring more discipline, since entering the Tempest Sector. Alicia and Tony were more anxious for another reason as well – while LENS messages remained instantaneous because of the nature of the quantum entanglement they ran on, the nature of this region of space meant that there was a considerable amount of circumnavigating one had to do before being able to do most of the jump back to Hegemonic space – and the senior Andalas’ ever-worsening health weighed heavy on their minds. Jessie Jaegar had been supportive – though in truth, Alicia felt uncertain about relying on Jessie’s support in this. The other woman’s father had actually been killed on Bastion, and Jake and Callie were still alive. That was going to be a kind of support Alicia knew she’d need soon, but she didn’t want to need it yet – she needed to be home to say goodbye.

The Tempest sector was chaotic enough that had Ywyn not been a truly expert pilot merely navigating it would have been a challenge, but after enough time, Ywyn drew near enough to the black hole to let Njos, Dolch and Jessie give her an idea of how the ship was holding up to do it.

“I’d like to do a little diagnostic to get things perfectly tuned before we try to do this, if that’s alright.” Taldir’s expression was mildly insulted as he approved the order.

Paenirc was chatting up Illias, trying to calm down – the Tenebrae had been getting closer to the Vulpexi recently, and seemed eager to learn more about the linguistic translation systems. Illias had been asking questions about Paenirc – mostly about the history of the Tenebrae, as the archaeologist was eager to explain, and the full history of much of the Tenebrae race was still dimmed and taught only in part to other species – and for the most part Paenirc had been eager to share and help his friend start understanding the real history of his own people.

Taldir himself had been spending more and more time with Tony – the two had actually become closer as the steely Keld and the young, hot-blooded human had bonded, talking over things they’d each seen. Tony had come to enjoy Taldir’s stories of wartime experience as a recon scout, and the Keld had been fascinated by some of the things Tony had seen when he started as an Explorer. Alicia wasn’t talking as the time dragged on and the ship was tinkered and tuned to make sure it was in perfect shape – which it would need to be, or very nearly, to survive straddling the event horizon despite the pulsar, neutron star pulses, and ion storms of the Tempest Sector. The hours dragged on as the technically minded crewmates worked, Iolan simply praying in the small, plant-lined room, while Alicia just sat with Oppa in her lap, desperately squeezing the Nathian to her chest, the smaller mammal seemingly embracing the crushing physical contact as a way of getting something to cling to in the midst of the anxiety of facing a tight orbit of a black hole. Ywyn herself was pacing the bridge of the Searching Wing, anxiously – it weighed especially heavy on her, she who would determine if she and her friends – including the children of other friends of hers – lived or died.

Still, after about two hours, the engineering team gave Ywyn the all clear to begin the final approach to the event horizon – and she did so, flaring the engine as necessary to pull the Searching Wing ever closer to that threshold that they must not cross. She turned out at a very, very broad angle, and Illias gave the signal – “We have the Horizon Signal.” Ywyn pulled slightly more aside, painstakingly remaining on course, even as the ship began to shudder, and Alicia flinched as the alloys of the hull groaned under strain, the Ivari renegade kept the ship on course.

Ywyn’s quiet voice, speaking to herself, became audible as the ship went quiet. “Come on, Punkhawk. Can’t go proving father right. You’ve done this kind of thing before – done lots of crazy things under fire. The ion storms aren’t worse than Esharioc fire. This is nothing to the battle of Horsehead. You can do this. You’ve got this.” The quiet murmur was a litany of desperation, and Alicia once again got a sense of the profound feeling of isolation the lonely Ivari ace had felt most of her life – one that had doubtless led to her habit of talking to herself. Illias was looking excited – the horizon signal fragment was being picked up from the recesses of the black hole – more of the One-in-Waiting’s voice to record, to understand.

From Ywyn’s perspective, the rest of the crew seemed very far away. Some of her instruments were going off, very slightly. Just a little at a time, as the shielding was struggling to maintain itself against the ceaseless drumming of ion storms and radiation that wracked the Tempest Sector on even the best of days, and the massive hypergravity she was attempting to circumnavigate only made it worse. She was painfully aware that a sufficiently damaging surge would blow out her engines – and at that point they’d all die, regardless of her skill. The crushing anxiety of the wait during the engineering team’s final check-over had been horrid, but this tense, second-by-second wait at peak performance while she waited for Illias to tell her they’d gotten the full fragment was nightmarish for entirely different reasons – and felt far more acutely. The ship was perilously close, more than once, and out of the corner of her eye she saw one of her redundancies kick online as one of the navigation instruments failed, then flickered back to life.

“Just a little further. Not going to prove the isolationists right now.” Her father, the disgraced Archon, had told her she’d just get herself killed doing this sort of thing, but she’d gone anyway, gotten herself exiled, and spent a lonely standard century figuring herself out with nothing but her own thoughts for company. As the instruments failed, Ywyn forced herself to keep performing – she wasn’t going to prove the worst of those thoughts right, not going to die now that she had finally proven what she was worth. The natural instinct towards navigation and three dimensional thinking that had been bred into the Ivari by millennia of atmospheric flight on their own wings was with her, giving her an edge as the instruments became more and more fouled.

“Ywyn! Ywyn! We have the fragment. The whole thing. Pull off, we’re good. Nothing to be gained by staying on-“ a massive shudder wracked the craft and Ywyn realized what was happening. She didn’t have long before massive system failure. She rapidly accelerated out, away from the event horizon, but still at a sharp angle to the singularity – she heard the crew’s voices raised in panic behind her as the craft continued to shudder, blocking them out as she brought the _Searching Wing_ out and away from the black hole’s gravity well – the slingshot maneuver might have been the oldest trick in the manual but it had never let her down.

“All clear?” They were alive, and Illias seemed eager, but the _Searching Wing_ would need field repair. They’d leave the Tempest Sector behind and pursue the rest of the trail in saner parts of the galaxy. For today, they’d accomplished their mission.


	23. The Tempest Record

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The fragment recovered from the Tempest Sector is listened to, and the implications are digested; Alicia and Tony worry about their parents.

The little crew of the Searching Wing sat down at the mess table where Tony and Alicia had cooked the meal. The crew took turns cooking, and in the midst of many of their skills being less helpful than usual, Tony and Alicia had taken to volunteering for mess duty more often. The dish they’d made that night was a chowder-like dish prepared with coconut milk and a blue juice that Paenirc had told them mixed well with seafood, as well as kelps and assorted greens.

The meal wasn’t a fancy one, but it was well received. Taldir especially praised it for the subtleties of the flavor, though Alicia had to keep herself from making a vaguely specist joke regarding cats and fish. Then again, she had actively asked Millan, the Epomi, and Paenirc, if the protein and the fact that it was aquatic in origin was going to be an issue, and both had said it would not – though Millan had insisted on not ingesting any of the meat directly. As the little team ate, Oppa smiled – the dish took cues from several Nathian ones, albeit was more spiced than most of the dishes the smaller mammals prepared. Paenirc flashed a few colors rapidly, but nodded, pleased, clacking his beak with excitement. “The spice. What is it?”

“Some of the spice we added was from a green curry that is used frequently in human cuisine. Why?” Ywyn was attempting to conceal her hiccups, but she seemed to be enjoying herself.

“Your parents’ curry recipe, right?” Tony started before nodding. Both the Andala siblings sometimes forgot that Ywyn had served with their parents – and given her lifespan, could very realistically wind up serving with their own grandchildren, who would be the first of the Andala line to outlive her, as human lifespans were increasing notably with each generation thanks to Galri genetic therapies that were used to slow the aging of the Hegemonic races. It was sometimes unsettling to remember that their friend would outlive them – and indeed, almost all her other friends – by such a huge margin.

“Mom and Dad made it all the time. Mom’s family was originally at least a little Indian – though a lot of the chaos that led to the formation of the Terran Republic as a unified state made finding actual records outside of family tradition a little hard. Dad’s family was supposedly more Mediterranean – north Africa and southern Europe, so his family recipes had a lot of seafood, and they liked working together to combine their human heritage and give us that part of ourselves.”

Njos looked between them, seemingly confused, though like all Palnt his facial expressions were not easy to read. “Right, the ancestral, regional groupings of your people. There were tensions among them for millennia?”

How to answer that? “Centuries, more like. For a long time there wasn’t much in the way of interaction beyond trade or conquest, but conquest was visited between empires on the basis of wanting resources – it was only after certain groups of humanity industrialized that violence on the basis of race instead of resources really began as a component of dominant society.”

Jessie answering that was surprising – then again, everything Alicia had ever heard about her legendary father had indicated that he was a pre-Republic history nut, so it would make sense that Jessie would know that. Paenirc coughed. “It was a matter of imperial control, then? For mine, it was more…simple hate, as years of skirmish over resources in times of hardship created grudges that continued to gain momentum until war became its own excuse.”

That certainly explained why the Keldebrair Empire had had to step in during the Tenebrae’s diaspora – why only a tiny percentage of the billions of Tenebrae lived on their original homeworld, Tenebras, these days – many of those who didn’t not even in the same sector. 

That led to a lull in the conversation, until Dolch moved the conversation back to the meal. “You were raised among Nathians, yes? But your parents wanted to teach you a bit about ancestral human culture?” Alicia nodded. “What else were you taught?”

There was a pause, and Alicia shrugged. “Old world hospitality traditions. The idea of wedding vows in human style, human films, literature, music…”

“And food, apparently.” That was Taldir.

“Food is a part of human cultures – the geopolitical region that both our parents lived in pre-Republic was one in which sharing a meal was a critical part of family growth and hospitality – food was a way of telling people they were cared for. Other cultures blending into that one were often recognized and adopted, among other things, through their traditional foods. Teaching human children about their culture’s traditional cooking was a critical part of teaching them about that culture.”

Oppa gave a nod. “Most Nathian clans have a traditional dish as well – though it is mostly a matter of holiday celebration, not as much something that everyone must learn to prepare – that might have more to do with communal living within a tribe, though.” Alicia nodded – she’d had the Nilpi Clan’s traditional dish but preferred that of the Malida – her own adoptive clan. Tony glanced around. “Right. Should we get on with the analysis of the recording?”

llias brought forward the recording of the Horizon Signal fragment they’d gotten. “I am ready. Everyone?”

The crew all nodded, and the recording began.

“Things are beginning to rise from the dust and seas that I helped arrange – and several that I did not. The Firstborn have played their own games as well, discovering what more lies out there – careful not to speak with anything else. Still other things have risen from sea and dust that will grow and develop in time. Time, which now flickers before my senses as I grow to understand better what I can do – though not all of it makes sense, I know that many species will someday roam the stars. I hope that I have time left to me to watch them develop – that others may hear my words, so that they know me as something other than a destroyer. That they will see me as I am, a watcher from out of time as they understand it, merely waiting for company – for something to observe. I know that death will come for many of the seeds the firstborn and I have planted – I do not yet understand the form it comes in, something that moves with purpose, but one unclear to me. I merely know that much of this galaxy and another will be lighted, before going forever as dark as it is now. What will be, was in my eyes, what was, will be. I have hopes that most will live – that the galaxies in which I first became aware of myself will have something watching over them, after I am gone. The Firstborn will not remember me so kindly, I suspect.” There was a ripple of gasps – it had seen Kyriion, in some form or another, and hadn’t known. But the One-in-Waiting was now speaking of the Firstborn, its name for the Precursors. It was about to tell them its side of the clash.

“They have learned from me, as I hoped they would – but there were consequences. They delved what I offered them and began learning of things I did not wish them to know – things that put them, and my own children at risk. I warned them, they needed to turn aside from this line of looking – that they would only find themselves back at their origins if they did not. Yet they persisted, taking the fundament of the galaxy and twisting it to build their own creations. Whether they understood what I was warning them was unclear, for I was not then what I am now. They did not seek to call to me or mine, but they were answered all the same – devastation that they only understood as a shadow out of hyperspace, to humble them, to teach them the lesson that some things are not meant to be taken or altered. At first, it was only those who worked in the pilfer of what is now called “dark” matter – our matter. Our life. Or those who commanded such things. But as their civilization continued in its arrogance, drawing ever deeper, they harmed me and my kind – accidents, to be sure. But I was an accident of cosmic proportion myself. I had no idea what their actions would bring, or the harm it could do, and as I could not seem to speak clearly with them, more drastic actions were taken. They created beings as weapons – ones capable of battling with my children. Ones who, though the Firstborn will not realize it, will only prey on other species. Reckless fools – I simply wish for them to stop tampering with the forces that keep matter together.”

The Horizon Signals had been an attempt at warning the Precursors at first – but they’d ignored or misunderstood it, and the Uncalled had devastated them. The One-in-Waiting had wanted to stave off catastrophe – catastrophe the Precursors were risking with what they tampered with. It confirmed what they’d suspected – the Uncalled had been defending themselves, as the Precursors were essentially harvesting their reality to power technology – and in response, the devastation had followed.

“We need to find the next one.”

Illias coughed. “Agreed, but that’s the next problem. The next one isn’t in a black hole. It’s on a hulk.”

Alicia blanched at the thought – time passed differently in those anomalous hulks, and she didn’t want to risk losing her parents in the time she spent aboard it. Taldir glanced at them.

“It will be about a year before we are back in Hegemonic space. I will give everyone some leave before we undertake that part of the mission. To sort themselves out before the risk. To attend any matters that need your attention before the next leg of the journey.”


	24. Revelation Point

Ritia was getting frustrated. It had been three standard months since her search had started and a standard month since she talked to the _Ghost of Sparta_ ’s crew. In that time, she’d wandered the Vetinari sector looking for the mysterious Specter of Doubt, and failed to find a real lead.

Or, more accurately, she’d found too many. He was a woman, he was Nathian, she was Palnt, it was a pseudonym used by a lot of people (which she’d already found out), it was a Dembra arms dealer looking to drum up sales, the Specter was ex-military, or that they were working with a crime syndicate. Ritia was exhausted with it – and from the looks of them, Liok and Harriet weren’t much happier. The team sent to recover the data on the Uncalled and Precursors had been out of contact for so long, with their recordings so locked down there had been no further leaks – but Command still wanted the Specter caught for the damage they were doing to the security of the Hegemony, and Ritia was almost tempted just to give it up. Despite the time she’d gotten with Iolin, and the friendship her coworkers seemed to have developed with Eritox, this job had proven more and more exhausting. The Zahn consortium had been more or less wiped out by their squall with the Ghost of Sparta and their assorted pirates, with the survivors picked off when they’d attempted to get away on smuggling ships – mostly by the Invictus battle group. 

Ritia was simply tired of this shit. They were sitting in the crew quarters of the _Laughing Kree_ , while the _Talon of Justice_ was getting some maintenance done in the dockyard. Iolan’s three fingered hands were clasped around her talons, and her own wings were folded tight against her back. Liok, Harriet and Eritox had started a card game, with Tumin dealing – they’d learned some time ago that the cyborg Nathian was a little too good at cheating at card games to let him be anything but an otherwise non-participating dealer. Ritia thought about what she had learned, what the rumors did seem to agree on: the current Specter was male. He was some sort of mammal – anyone who heard his voice said that the specific range heard was the result of mammalian vocal patterns being professionally distorted. That ruled out everything but a human, a Keldebriar, a Nathian, or an Epomi – that class of life also included the Tmari and the Dralt, but given that they had only made first contact three standard years ago and there was evidence of the Specter of Doubt being around starting only five standard years after the Incursion, their species could pretty safely be ruled out as a suspect pool. Not that a member of one of those species couldn’t have taken the role in that time – but that the current Specter’s operating patterns and recognized signatures had remained the same for that entire time, meaning it was almost certainly the same individual – the mantle hadn’t changed hands. It had been confirmed that the individual was in the Vetinari sector.

Tumin coughed. “I know of a crime family who may have some idea of where the Specter is. My own, in fact. They may be willing to give us a degree of aid if we are willing to do them a favor or pay them sufficiently.”

Ritia thought about it. On one hand, Tumin’s adoptive family had a good reputation – they didn’t kill anyone who came to them on business as a matter of practicality. You couldn’t do business with corpses, and if people got the impression that they might be killed for working with you, anyone else looking to do business tended to make themselves scarce. At the same time, Ritia knew full well that the Jelairs were ruthless – she had little faith that if her little team drew too close to a family resource, Tumin would side with his family and wouldn’t hesitate for an instant to watch them gunned down….

She glanced at Iolan.

Of course. He was obligated to the Jelairs by family – what was it the pirates had said? “We hear rumors that the current Specter is related to one of the mafia bigwigs in the sector…” She thought about what Tumin had already let slip about knowing about the Uncalled and the Precursors, claiming net traffic on the dark side around it had been too much to miss, but that seemed implausible now, she’d just been distracted at the time…

Wait – what had Tumin said, initially? The Specter’s arrogance unleashed a wave of racial violence that cost him adoptive family…could it be that it was someone else operating from within his organization? Or that someone else had been responsible for stoking the race riots the Guard had had to stop and that the other person had merely framed the Specter for it? If it was Tumin, he was setting up a rival, and a usurper, to die for his crimes as a form of revenge for loss of loved ones.

“Tumin, Ulen, could you come with me for a moment?” They both rolled to their feet and followed Ritia. The Ivari smuggler led her boyfriend and the diminutive cyborg to the cargo bay and began talking to both of them, pacing as she did so. 

“I have some thoughts about what Tumin just suggested, about where to go next.” She paused. “Tumin, is there some reason you waited until just now to involve your family in your search for the person who usurped your handle?”

Tumin’s organic eye widened only a fraction – it wouldn’t have been notable to anyone but someone who had already fixed her eyes on the Nathian criminal for any reaction at all. But Ritia did, and hooboy, did she notice that milimeter’s worth of reaction. Tumin schooled his face back to normal, even as Ritia nodded to Ulen, who swept the Nathian’s legs out from under him and pinned him.

“What gave me away?”

“Just putting a lot of little things together. A few things you said when you were first hired, plus what the pirates said when we traded with them, your fairly open disdain for the Hegemony…”

“Just because I’m anti-authoritarian…”

“No, no. There is a difference between being anti-authoritarian and spilling secrets that might get millions of people killed simply because you don’t like the government keeping secrets. The one thing I don’t understand though: why come with us? You were smart enough to keep up the charade for a full year, but you let a few things slip, and you had to realize it was going to add up and let us figure it all out eventually.” 

Tumin gave a little bark. “Got me there. Mostly? I wanted to see what happened. I wanted a chance at seeing that other bastard go down for causing the death of my adoptive cousin – an Eshrelia whose parents died in the war, who had nowhere to go once the war ended, was found basically feral by the Jelairs and taken in. Tserin wasn’t a bad guy, they was sweet, and they were one of the first of his people to join Nex’arra’s “Reunification” crusade to bring their species back together into something positive – and someone whipped a bunch of stupid citizens into a frenzy that killed Tserin out of spite. And they used my handle to do it. My handle, the one I used to shed light on the Hegemony’s mistakes and demand some damned accountability, some oversight by the citizenry, and they used it to spin up a bunch of narrow minded bullshit that killed thousands of people!”

There was no posturing in the words – just a cold rage. Ritia was convinced – Ulen wasn’t, and they both heard the bootsteps of the other three members of the team coming down to the cargo bay. Iolan asked the question.

“That wasn’t what Ritia asked. Why come with us?”

“Because I wanted to make sure he was found. I thought I could cover my tracks well enough til I split off – you didn’t need to know, no one did.”

“And why did you leak the information anyway?”

“Honestly? Because I didn’t think the Hegemony would be honest about it. They weren’t totally honest about the genetic coding of the Sclunter, or the fact that, oh yeah, the damn things had engineered epigenic triggers to get stronger, smarter, and get stronger immune systems the more time they spent getting the endorphin rushes of combat, meaning that they would have learned early on to NEVER do anything other than keep fighting. They let people get into all sorts of trouble with those bioengineered murderers that we were NEVER going to be able to co-exist with because if they acknowledged the actual nature of the problem they were going to have to go deal with it – something that was going to expend a lot of political capital to deal with a problem that mostly damaged areas with less political power anyway. So when all I knew about the Precursors was that they were likely the fallen empire that had created the Sclunter, I thought I should dig and find out everything I could, release all the information I could, so that the Hegemony couldn’t pick and choose what information it wanted out there right now, what it wanted to bury, and what it wanted to wait for the best political moment to let people know. And as I said before, I don’t give a fuck,” the Terran word came out hard, “about the Hegemony. My loyalty is to the Jelairs and to the people in the Vetanari Sector.”

There was some truth to that, though in other places it was almost woefully unfair. The questions about the Sclunter as an issue had gone for some time, the ethics of, as Tumin put it, “dealing with the problem” argued ferociously. Plus, in the midst of all the other conflicts, the resources to deal with the Sclunter had taken time to be available. Still, with that logic, the smuggler and bounty hunter both saw why Tumin had acted as he had. They were all looking at her.

“Alright. For right now, everyone stand down. We’ll deal with this in a bit. Right now…Ulen, Eritox, cuff him. Harriet, Liok, keep an eye on him. He tries to go anywhere, knock him out. I still want his help dealing with the jackass who used the fear to whip up a race riot.” 

Ritia wasn’t sure how much she wanted to argue with him. There was a point to what he was saying - sure, she understood how the Vulpexi Dominion’s way of keeping the Sclunter on a leash made the delay make sense, ditto why the Synthor awakening and the Kyriion Crisis definitely registered higher on the then-Federation’s priority list than the Marauders. Hell, she even understood why the Alliance-Federation war couldn’t have waited, but…Wait, that was it. She’d flown Adisa around trying to find and deal with Murdoch, but that had all been classified to hell and back, and from the perspective of the people in the sectors most ravaged by the Sclunter marauders, there was no reason to see the Alliance-Federation cold war and the attendant skirmishes between the Terran Republic and the Keldebriar Empire as anything other than a waste of military resources on a cheap political dispute that could have been better spent protecting them from the “bioengineered murderers.” For that matter the two sides had only accelerated as far as they had because they didn’t come to the table about Murdoch til near the end. 

In thinking about all this Ritia could definitely see his point about keeping secrets.

Everyone started talking at once, but she could see Harriet’s little nod of respect – and Iolan’s. Eritox and Liok were a little less convinced, but Ritia needed time to think over what to do with all that.


	25. A Long Coming Farewell

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jake and Callie reflect with their children on lives long lived.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would like to say to everyone that if you haven't read the original series already, you need to for this moment to have the right effect. If you have, then this one will hurt, but it's been time. Time to face the pain. Fangs out.

Disembarking the _Searching Wing_ was altogether uneventful – the small unit had a few months’ leave before they had to re-board the little ship and attempt to dock with the Titan of Carrion. In the meanwhile, Alicia and Tony had their own appointment to attend – LENS messages had been coming through with ever greater frequency about Jake and Callie, who were rapidly coming to the end of their lives. The Andala siblings had landed back on Tildas II two days ago, and had been on deathwatch ever since they’d returned to their childhood home. Both Andala parents looked bad these days – eyes a mess of cataracts from years of flying too close to radiation, bodies stiff and pained from taking too many chances when they were young, all adding up.

“I’m glad you two made it back.”

That was the first thing the eighty-eight year old Callie had said to her children when they’d landed on Tildas. The two Andala kids had hugged their mother ferociously when she and their father had come to see them.

“So, how have you liked exploring the stars? I know, you’ve been probing the secrets of the galaxy lately, but what have you seen since the last time we saw you?” Jake’s voice was tired, but eager to hear – both parents were eager to hear about their children’s adventures. Alicia had often suspected that their parents missed their own days of daring in their youth, missed flitting about among stars and taking reckless chances, but the undeniable pride in her dad’s voice filled her heart up. She was glad she’d made it back as well.

“We’ve been seeing a lot. We saw the devastation of the Abandoned Sector, the insane galactic geography of the Tempest Sector, we’ve been all over the Western Rim and seeing all sorts of live. Did you guys see any of the video we got on Catlatan II?”

Jake chuckled ominously. “Yeah. That’s one hell of a deathworld. I have a sinking suspicion that Adisa and Jaegar would have loved to run exercises there, had they known about it.” He shrugged, which turned into a cough, and Callie let out a little cry of alarm.

Jake wiped his mouth with the robe, in the usual scarlet and azure colors of the Malida clan, the same shades the two of them had painted in tiger stripes onto their fighters - both the Sabers and the Raksashas. The scarlet was almost, but not quite, enough to hide that a little blood had come up from the cough. Callie was looking at him concerned and he shrugged. “Come on, love. We both know it’s close. Don’t pretend you don’t feel it too.”

That statement had torn fibers out of Alicia’s heart, especially the weirdly serene look on her father’s face when he said it, and her mother took his hand. The two seemed ready, but Alicia wasn’t sure she was. Tony took a steadying breath. “We’re back now. We wanted to see you again before…”

Callie gave a throaty little chuckle. “Think you got here just in time.” She didn’t seem to be shocked when Auntie Namna came charging over. 

“What are you two doing up? You’re supposed to be resting for the treatment you have tomorrow…” Callie grabbed her adoptive sister in a tight hug, one that Jake quickly joined in.

“Sis. You know we love you, but do you remember, a long time ago, when we told you that you should never discount human instinct? It’s like that. Rest isn’t going to make much difference at this point. A few days, at this point. And you know...I think I’m more okay with that than I thought I’d be. I wanted to take a walk around the place we grew up - the place we raised our children - the place we crashed. Three times. Shaving a few hours off of the few days we have left from the exertion isn’t...really going to matter…”

The sentence broke off in a chuckle, which sounded a little rougher than the one before, and Alicia could see the tears in her mother’s eyes. “I’m glad our kids made it back. And hey, good news. The Galri gene therapies we got for them in utero...they’ll have a good thirty, forty years more than we did - and that’s assuming they take as many stupid risks as we did. Though from the Catlatan footage that seems possible, eh, sweetie?” 

Alicia and Tony laughed - and with that little burst, found themselves sobbing. Tony suddenly found himself getting angry. “Hey, wait! You can’t just stop and die now! Mom’s the reason we know humans can sometimes beat Kyriion! You’ve both survived getting shot down three times! You brought down a fucking Oblivion Seal, and more dreadnaughts than were on your records! You’re the famous Andalas, the “Alliance’s Immortals.” And there’s treatment, it’s not like people just taking a desperate guess like aunt Namna did with Kyriion. Why aren’t you trying? All those times you told us we weren’t allowed to give up and now...you’re just going to wait a few days? That’s your exit?”

Jake looked at him, with Callie busy stroking Alicia’s hair. “Son, there’s a bit of a difference. The treatments we’re getting combine Galri genetic repair and Nathian medicine, as well as some of the best collaborative treatments human doctors have been able to come up with. But the thing is, there’s only so much that can do. We spent the better part of forty five years in cockpits, doing insane things, for insane reasons, before the modern shielding against stellar radiation was able to be powered on a fighter craft frame. We pulled G’s that would, on their own, have killed species with less sturdy constitutions. And we did crash into planets three or four times at absurd speeds - often climbing out of the cockpit while the ion drive radiation was still bleeding off. The treatments can fix some of the cancers, some of the damage, but at this point we are really just buying time - and the treatments often leave us too tired to move for days. And any time we have left is going to be spent doing those every week. We did it while we waited for you and Namna to get back, but for the most part...we’re ready. Without treatment, it’ll be in days. With treatment…”

He shrugged. “Callie, your instincts are better than mine.”

“I’d call it about two or three weeks with treatment. At this point there’s only so much that can be done for bodies that have been abused this hard.” She chuckled a bit. “Hey, it was worth it the whole time. Trillions of sapient beings in the galaxy and we’ve seen things most of them will never be able to imagine, both beautiful and nightmarish. We’ve been the heroes of hundreds of battles, both big and small, and been immortalized in so many legacies - you being the most important ones, because you’re amazing and you’re going to go on and leave legacies of their own.”

Namna coughed, “Also the fact that Tildas still has an atmosphere that didn’t turn into plasma from clustered nova-bombing at the end of the Esharioc war, don’t forget that one.”

The whole family laughed for a moment at that, and this time it was Jake’s turn to hold Callie as she coughed. 

The little family went indoors, to the Andala’s homes, and it was clear to both Tony and Alicia that their parents really had been preparing to die for some time. “Alright. It’s late. Why don’t we get some rest. We’ll go for a family walk tomorrow, after breakfast. Tell you any stories we haven’t told you before, or need to tell you again, answer any questions you have that we can answer.”

The little family went to sleep in the fashion of the Nathians, one very large bed that could fit all four of them. There were of course, as Tony and Alicia had learned when they’d asked, separate beds for parents to take for mating, which was generally a good catalyst for Nathian parents to have what humans called “the talk” with their children, but for right now, the family cuddled up together and rested.

***

The next morning came soon, and the little family stood up, with Alicia and Tony supporting their aging parents. Jake couldn’t help but feel a little embarrassed at the way they were now being half-carried by their children. It was a bit awkward, but he’d seen enough Nathians carried by younger relatives as they got up in age to see it. Stars, Namna was perhaps no more than a decade from needing it herself, to look at the silver in her fur, though she’d last longer than they did. 

Their adoptive sister seemed to have accepted what was happening since yesterday - she seemed to keep herself busy with little touches of help here and there, while he and Callie told her it was okay, and that they’d actually prefer she just walked with them. “So, we’ve told you about the place we were found, right?”

“A few klicks west of the village. Fighting a Ramor, right?”

Callie nodded. “Yeah. We’d been here three days by then, after the Horizons crashed. We weren’t sure if we were alone, but we happened across a few Nathians - including your great uncle, for the record, and they helped us out, took us in. They saw it as a little gesture, but it’s what led to us becoming what we did, and saving this world from both the Vulpexi and the Eshrelia. Can’t believe it’s been so many years since that first...Endirmas pokes around every now and then. Can’t believe I call a Vulpexi my friend these days…”

She trailed off, then her eyes focused again. “The most important lesson you need to learn from our story is that the thing that makes us Nathian also makes us human. That love and attachments are important, and that a little bit of compassion can wind up making a big difference. Note, as Namna says, the presence of this atmosphere. We were able to save them because they saved us.” Her voice was heavy with age, but here and there it seemed to crack and traces of the fiery young ace pilot, and doting mother, she’d once been were coming through.

Jake added. “Right. And you know that you, Alicia, were conceived on the Khan. We didn’t know, at the time.” Alicia flushed.

“Dad…”

“No, not...We were being reckless then. Thought we’d lost quite a lot with the Crisis, the war, the Horizons...all of that. We weren’t letting ourselves get attached to our squadron, and we weren’t being responsible. We weren’t making them stick to training or discipline the way we should have been as their officers, and that apathy probably got some of them killed. Remember, when we’d sometimes wake up shouting, or apologizing? The names you heard belonged to some of those pilots. It’s one of the biggest regrets we’ve carried. And...when we get to the other side, I hope they can forgive us. Next lesson to remember from us, even though you’ll wind up applying it very differently than we should have,” Jake’s voice broke off and he had to force himself not to cry, this many years later, but he forced it through. “Don’t ever forget that everyone you meet is a person with their own dreams and ambitions and loved ones, and don’t ever let yourself become so detached from life or love that you’re okay with throwing yourself into suicide mission after suicide mission. A lot of the things that have added up to where your mother and I are now were the results of a passive death wish we should have handled sooner.” Callie felt a rush equivalent to what she used to flying as fast and reckless as she could - hearing one of them admit that for far too much of their lives, they’d been looking for little more than a spectacular death...neither of them had ever admitted it to anyone but each other before. 

“Life is worth it. Somewhere out there,” she gestured up, “Or down here with your loved ones, there’s always something out there that you should be willing to live for. I wouldn’t have gotten through Kyriion...I never really told anyone but your father some of the things it said, but I think it breaks people psychologically as well as physically. And no matter how afraid you are, how doomed you feel, never give up on what you love or the ability to feel - we wiped out the Synthor before you could see them in person, but the horror holofilms you’ve seen about what they were like have, if anything, toned down just how horrifying and how wrong, unliving beings with no loved ones and no attachments and no emotions could be.”

Callie and Jake could see their kids tearing up, like they were holding back tears, but it was important, they had to say it. 

“Last lesson. Trust your instincts, but know when to listen to reason. Always bear in mind what’s most important to you, whatever that is, and chase it. Do what you can for it. If you do that, you’ll never have to worry about going off course - no matter how many stupidly dangerous places you go. We spent time on Haven to make sure you grew most of the way up somewhere safe. We didn’t join the Marauder War, not because we didn’t have that instinct but because we knew you needed us more than the Hegemony did. And when we left you with Namna for five human years during the Incursion, it was because we knew that if we wanted to look after our family, we had to go to help the Hegemony. Sometimes, it’s about knowing where you can do the most good.” Callie hugged Tony and Jake hugged Alicia as Namna set out a little picnic blanket for them.

The site the family had chosen for the picnic had been planned deliberately. It was where the little shrine they’d been married at was - the shrine made from the scrap pulled from the Horizons, next to the little berry bush that had provided Jake and Callie’s first meal on Tildas - and the one they ate with their kids before they’d gone away for their last war. Tony picked a bushel and split it evenly amongst the group, while Namna set out the meal she’d brought for the five of them - waving away the berries herself.

Callie felt her eyes prickle with tears as the tart, sweet flavor, and all the memories that came with it exploded across her tongue again, as she watched the sun slowly start going down. She realized this would be the last time she had these - in all likelihood, the walk alone, coupled with the accumulated damage she and Jake’s spines had suffered over the years...she was, in fact, fairly sure this would be her last sunset. 

That’s okay, though. I’ve seen so many, on so many worlds. And this one probably tops them all. All of them set eventually - me and Jake’s included.

The family kept talking, and Tony and Alicia managed to squeeze out a few more war stories, a few more stories of their parents’ childhoods from Namna, and so much else. Callie and Jake spent the day feeling, just for a moment, as though they were young again. They thought they should share something, though. Just one last piece.

“Oh, did you hear? The _Khan_ is getting refitted. The whole squadron voted on it, donated some money to get it done. It’s an older ship, so it’ll never really stand up to one of the modern Hurricane-Class carriers, but it’ll be a damn good exploration vessel once the shipwrights of Anadan V get finished with it. We just asked that they keep the plaque up. The one with all the names. And that they add our names, once...well. You know. Maybe you’ll be able to see the galaxy in our old ship, our old carrier.”

That did it, Alicia and Tony started sobbing and hugging as hard as they could. Seeing the galaxy in their parents’ old ship - like they were still watching over them…

“We’d be honored. I hope...I hope we get assigned to the _Khan_.”

Jake laughed. “I hope so. We’d like to be there with you in spirit as much as we can. I’m glad you got to see the galaxy, and I’m glad we made it as safe for you as we could. I wish we could see what you’ll make of it...but I suspect we have a pretty good idea.” 

Callie nodded. “Hey. Take care of each other. And...stay with us. I suspect...I suspect it won’t be long now.”

The two weathered, battle-tested pilots reclined on the blanket, watching the sun go down, murmuring gently to each other and their children, and their sister. They kept looking into each other’s eyes as the dying sun dipped below the horizon, and before long they’d drifted into a fitful sleep, holding each other, all five of them together. 

Jake and Callie Andala, founders, commanders of Tiger Squadron, parents to Tony and Alicia Andala, children of the Dala and Anders families, and adoptive members of Nathian Clan Malida, woke a few times, briefly, in the night to come, but eventually, they woke up for the last time.

“I think...it’s time. Alicia. Tony. Namna. Good luck. See what’s...out there. Take care of each other. And know...we’ll be watching over you.” They turned to each other. “Alright. This time we reach the other side. Last ride of the day. For real this time.” Slowly, they drifted off, and Tony could swear he heard his father reply to his mother’s last words… “Yeah, fangs out.”

They didn’t wake up again. Their hearts stopped within minutes of each other’s, as though the universal law of mortality itself had accepted that they had to go together.

The next day, Tony and Alicia carried their parents’ bodies where they were directed by Namna, and saw, in a clearing, a sight they hadn’t expected. A ship, built in the style of a Raksasha, clearly cobbled together from spare parts - at a guess, the ones left by their parents’ final crash. Namna explained that this was the funeral they’d wanted. They’d pre-programmed the flight computer.

Putting the bodies gently down on a blanket, wrapped together, Tony and Alicia keyed the sequence, and stood back.

They could hear their parents’ old album start from the speaker even as it took off. 


	26. Negotiating Doubts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ritia and Tumin clash

Ritia’s apprehension about meeting with the Jelairs hadn’t abated in the slightest once she’d apprehended Tumin – but for right now, the one still leaking secrets and causing chaos was the one she wanted to go after.

“Tumin,” she began, speaking to the restrained Nathian. “If I agree to help you run down the one who usurped your title, do you promise not to release anything regarding the Precursors?”

“Not in the slightest.” The words were delivered coldly, which frustrated Ritia. It meant that she couldn’t trust the Nathian enough to release him, despite her mounting conviction that he wasn’t actually in the wrong, there were secrets that needed to be kept. 

“But this spread of information puts people at risk. We don’t know what they’ll try if the word of the One-in-Waiting gets out, or what they’ll do if they think we can reverse-engineer their technology – some of them may still try it. For that matter, we don’t know how much knowledge puts a person in danger.”

Tumin sneered. “If knowing what the military knows would put me in danger, don’t you think I’d be dead by this point?” 

He wasn’t wrong, but his smug countenance infuriated Ritia. “Alright, fine. So, are we going to be fucking murdered by your family?”

Tumin shook his head. “Still need you to hunt down the guy who took my handle and got my cousin killed. Getting you killed would derail any plan I had to do that.”

“And after that?”

“Still no. It would completely ruin the Jelairs’ reputation to have people killed who’d worked with them. I won’t be submitting to custody, though.” Ritia smiled, walked back to the ship’s cockpit, and pulled the _Laughing Kree_ into the orbit of a small moon, signaling the _Talon of Justice_ to do likewise.

“No, Tumin, that’s not what’s going to happen. See, we’re not about to let you simply get away with everything you’ve already pulled. We need information, and we need to know how you got the information you did. I need some way of guaranteeing you won’t keep doing this, or you’re going to get to find yourself a new way of getting payback – preferably from prison.”

Tumin’s mechanical eye tracked to Ritia a little too well and Harriet chuckled. “So, Ritia. That’s what you were waiting to explain, was it?”

Tumin shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. I’m not caving to the Hegemony. They don’t trust me, they don’t trust their people, and they’ve been abundantly clear they don’t care much about my own. I’d rather go to prison than yield to them in any way.”

Ritia sighed. “Tumin. Are you seriously going to let someone get away with murdering your cousin simply because you don’t want to cooperate?”

The diminutive cyborg shrugged. “Are you going to let someone get away with causing chaos, knowing that with his attitude he’ll likely get more people killed than I will, simply because I don’t want to cooperate?”

By this point Ulen and Eritox had gotten on the ship, but Harriet and Liok had to admit – Tumin made a decent point. It took all their discipline to keep a straight face and not acknowledge it in any way, but the bastard had a point. 

Ritia’s crest ruffled in agitation, but she wasn’t sure what she could do. Eritox stepped forward. “I have a suggestion. There are things that one can get on the black market – tracking cuffs, chips, that sort of thing. Really they’re more for pets or cargo, but we could always get one into Tumin to keep him from disappearing on us.”

Tumin gave a bark of laughter. “Do you think that there is any computerized object in the galaxy you could possibly use to contain me that I couldn’t figure out how to disable eventually?” Ritia couldn’t really argue with that point.

Harriet and Liok watched while getting thoroughly sick of this shit. The little hacker had absolutely refused to be of any help to them and was likely to continue to do so, out of a self-righteous sense of rightness. They could admire the cybernetic little shit’s conviction and willingness to stand by his ideals, but it wasn’t going to get them anywhere in a hurry – and then Ritia’s eyes got narrow and she leaned in.

“Tumin, I know you don’t trust the Hegemony. I know you’re the Specter of Doubt, dedicated to unmasking secrets and lies to the public, and on one hand I think that’s quite clever, and probably needs doing.”

“Then why are you wasting my time trying to get me to back down from it? The mere fact that you’re chasing the guy who’s been exposing a few dirty secrets instead of the one who whipped up a species riot is itself a pretty good indicator that the Hegemony isn’t real interested in the good of the common people.”

“Okay in all fairness Tumin, when we got this mission both us and the people who sent us thought you and your target were the same person. Second, I just want to ask you something. Do you realize that for the purposes of blackmail, smuggler ships are rigged to record everything? And to transmit them to data dead drops? That the owner of the ship can signal to button up beyond further transmission at any time? Because they are, Tumin. And I did. I know where to go retrieve the recordings of your confession a few days ago – and regardless of what happens next, right or wrong, if you don’t cooperate with me willingly – for that matter, Iolan knows where the data is, and I can easily send a message to someone I trust on the better side of the law to go retrieve it for me, so don’t get any cute ideas about having the Jelairs wipe us out – that gets dropped, and you’ll be getting a visit from State Security. So let me ask you again: what can you do to convince me that you should be allowed to operate, or that I should let you frame the riot-rouser for your misdeeds?”

Tumin’s organic eye narrowed. “I see. You don’t want to sell me out – or at least, you would prefer not to. You will, if I can’t give you something. Unfortunately, I cannot, in good conscience, let the Hegemony decide what it tells us and what it doesn’t.” 

Ulen spoke then. Something Ritia hadn’t thought he would, but his suggestion made sense. “What if you don’t have to? Is there anyone within the Hegemony you trust? Me, any of us?”

Tumin laughed. “Not on your life. I’ve seen Ritia lie shamelessly since I met her, and she just revealed that this entire conversation was a scam to get me to explain my position. Her backup are certainly military, and both you and your acid-green scaled boytoy are willing to take money to do the law’s bidding. You want me to work with you? What a joke.” He laughed for a moment, then paused.

Ritia spoke. “What about Ensign Ywyn?”

“Pardon?”

“When you were asking about who would reveal what aboard the ship looking to investigate the Precursors, I pointed out that Ywyn and the Andala family are pretty famously willing to buck command if they think it’s the right thing to do – Ywyn has a whole two books that talk about secrets her government didn’t want out there. If I were to come to an agreement with you, where I become some sort of courier who makes sure you can get messages to Ywyn about whether or not some information you’ve found needs to see the public eye, or whether you’re missing context that makes it too dangerous, would you be willing to take her word?”

Tumin Jelair, otherwise known as the Specter of Doubt, took in the question. “The Punkhawk? Yes. If someone of her known integrity and willingness to reveal hidden things to hold people in power accountable tells me that there is context that makes something I have found best left obscured, I would be receptive to her reasons. If you can put me in contact with her for that arrangement, I’ll abide by her judgement.”

Ritia didn’t sag with relief. But she had to stop herself. Ulen’s idea had been a good one – she made note that she needed to jump those flexible bones again before the mission was over, but for now, she was going to work on getting a message to Ywyn. Hopefully the daughter of the disgraced Archon would be willing to help again.


	27. The Titan of Carrion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Back aboard the ancient space hulk, after the final fragment of the Horizon Signal.

Tensions on the _Searching Wing_ were high as the team approached the ominous hulk, already present on the viewscreen, known as the _Titan of Carrion_. Built by architects and shipwrights long dead to serve a purpose long forgotten, it still roamed the galaxy, inspiring terrifying ghost stories amongst any who saw it or caught it on their scanners. It had, until the ill-fated mission aboard it, Operation: Sundered Shadow, been zealously avoided by both Hegemonic officials and private spacers. It had drawn its share of treasure hunters hoping to pillage the ancient hulk, but none had survived the attempt, even if the twisted ruins of their ships now clung to the monster they’d tried to dock with – the closest to graves their owners would ever have, silent testaments to the folly of trespassing on ancient secrets.

Alicia was still shaken from the deaths of her parents, but she’d had time to look over the _Khan_ as it was still getting refitted. She wished she and Tony were approaching this monster in their parents’ old carrier, so Jake and Callie could watch over them as they got into the _Titan_. She was quietly talking to Jessie and trying to calm down, though Jessie had hugged both her and Tony when they’d returned from their leave. If anyone understood what it was to bury a parent, even knowing that person died exactly the way they would have wanted to, but still missing them and struggling to believe that they were gone, it was Jessie Jaegar.

Still, Ywyn was in the cockpit and had already figured out how to prime the drives to rip away from the hulk as fast as they could in the event that they needed a quick exit. It had already been decided that she, along with both the biologist and the linguist, were staying on the _Searching Wing_. For that matter, while he was unhappy about it, per Taldir’s orders, so was Dolch. Ywyn and Iolin were being left on the ship because their job was elsewhere – Iolin was still deciphering the genetic sequencing data they’d found in the biolabs on Gravalax, and Ywyn was needed for a quick getaway. Illias and Dolch, by contrast, were simply of species that struggled to move as fast as would be desirable in this instance.

Alicia was forcing down the claws of icy terror in her heart, though Tony had spent the last night hyping up why they didn’t have to be worried – they’d managed just fine on Catlatan, right? That had to count for something. Plus, they were Andalas. The galaxy didn’t kill them until they were ready. If this was just about getting in and out fast, with all the daring and nerve and speed it took to do so, then their family was uniquely suited for the purpose. Taldir was carrying himself with the feline grace common of trained members of his species, but the rigidity of his neck gave away how nervous the Keld was. Alicia did a few stretches with Jessie and Tony, to help them move faster. They’d been drilling for weeks with the gear they were meant to hook into the computers aboard. Slam the key into the port, fire the sequence to have it take in all the data, withdraw it and run back to the ship. Taldir had already insisted that no weapons be brought aboard – there was no point in that, as the Uncalled were almost categorically untouchable by any weapon the Hegemony possessed, aside from Eshrelia gravity hammers, and the lack of capacity to detect them made those almost useless.

That, and Alicia still hoped that there was a chance that they could be communicated with. Somehow. The Searching Wing got closer to the ancient ship, and she could hear Oppa murmuring a constant, quiet prayer at the sight of the silent machine.

The ship finally came within distance, and Ywyn fired off the magnetic mooring systems, bringing the _Searching Wing_ into contact with the Titan of Carrion. The small team took deep breaths, then sprinted aboard, taking advantage of scans that had been gleaned from Operation Sundered Shadow. They’d brought aboard food and water to prevent the time dilation from getting out of hand, and in the interest of having good communications, Dolch and Njos had worked carefully to jury-rig a fully LENS-based communication that could be carried on an individual person’s gear instead of mounted to a comms station or a ship. The lag caused by the anomalies of the hulk would not cause them to lose contact this time.

Alicia was running for the data room with Tony, taking in, while she desperately tried to ignore it, the eerie sterilized aspect of the ship – even knowing there’d been a brutal battle a year before, she couldn’t shake the feeling that there had been nothing living here for centuries – even knowing that the Uncalled, who did not live as she understood the concept, did roam here still, she couldn’t shake her fears. Aside from the eerily damped echoes of her footsteps along the alloy corridors, the hulk was also silent as a tomb, as though it taunted her with the guarantee that if she and her brother were lost here, the Andala line would end and this place would feel no change for what occurred.

What will be was, what was will be. The words sprang unbidden to Alicia’s mind and she couldn’t help but laugh a little at it. Her laughter echoed no more than the pounding of her boots but it felt better, eased the tension for a moment as she rounded a corner. Taldir had been moving more slowly than she had, she knew, but now burst into a sprint to pass her, not in competition but because he wanted to be on the receiving end of whatever awaited in the data room.

The data room was empty as ever, and the little group rapidly deployed the little devices that were meant to siphon the data. A hum came in through the comms and Njos’s voice accompanied them. “Can you hear me?”

“Confirm.”

“Good, it works even on the hulk. Listen, you have a problem. There’s the hyperspace shadows that indicate there’s Uncalled moving around.” Icy terror shot through Alicia’s heart, at that statement, but she remained calm, and continued to pull the data off the ship. Another message came in.

“It’s been a standard hour. Better yet, we’ve discovered that there is a fragment of the Horizon Signal within the ship - possibly an artificially generated singularity, which would explain the eternal functioning of the engine. I’ll attempt to isolate it, and see what happens…”

The first message rattled out of the machine she’d gathered, the translation software on the data disk pushing out the words.

“ _We have assailed things we were not meant to behold, and we might have killed a god. Incredible as it sounds to say, it’s true. We may have killed a god, but its children, its unseen angels of death still hunt us through this. After tens of millennia of being struck back to our most primitive and vulnerable state, after millennia of building back, we have finally slain the architect of our ruin - and the probable architect of life in this galaxy, at least. We are still hunted, haunted. We have broken the cycle of being forced to our roots to force ourselves back up. And it was a mistake. We needed to learn. I do not know how many of us are left, and I can still hear that ominous crunch and twist that comes when they create singularities inside our bodies. I know without knowing how that my own will soon be crushed, but I need to leave this warning, that something which comes after will remember and do better than we did._ ”

“ _The project to create the Sclunter was an abject failure. We created screaming, violent savages that would learn to pirate, who would only ever gather resources beyond what we gave them through pillage. I dread what we have loosed on the galaxy, for they will outlive us. They successfully battled a group of Uncalled to a standstill, but the dark matter entities show little interest in them beyond as obstacles to get to us. If they scatter, they’ll live. And they have.” A racking sigh. “We thought this ship would be the last refuge of our race, a place to run where we didn’t have to be afraid of their return. It uses their own force to propel it, they shouldn’t be able to find their way aboard without being turned into fuel, but we’ve learned, when they die, when they fight, they leave behind clusters of dark matter - clusters that just make the singularity worse. The drive will shortly be beyond control. What we hoped would be our race’s last hope, our Ark -” here Alicia knew that Illias had worked real miracles on that translation software if it was able to come up with that for her and Tony - “Will instead be our tomb. A drifting monument to our hubris and tragedy, luring treasure hunters and the curious to their doom._ ”

A bitter wheezing that sounded almost like the laughing sob of a man pushed beyond reason and about to eat his own weapon. “ _If anyone is watching, look at what we’ve come to. Whatever you are, we were. What we are, you will be. A ruin, reminiscing fondly about the halcyon days of our long gone civilization, all dust and devastation now. See what we have become, and avoid it. There are stones meant to be left unturned, secrets meant to remain mystery. Things not meant to be trifled with.”_

“IF YOU’RE STILL THERE YOU NEED TO RUN. It’s been six hours and the Uncalled are getting closer. I’ve tracked up the Horizon Signal, just get out of there.”

Alicia couldn’t. She needed to know. What had happened here that they didn’t already know.

The recording gave a continued chuckle. “ _We didn’t realize it. Didn’t realize that the One-in-Waiting was protecting us, calling them back before they went too far. If you came aboard to find ancient treasure, ancient knowledge, in hopes your people could engineer it, leave. Or don’t. They’ll come for you, and I hope they do. Nothing here should leave - there’s nothing here of value. Nothing worth remembering. Just the ramblings of fools who went too far and lost everything a hundred times. I hate what we became - got all my loves killed, trying to get back what we lost. The One-in-Waiting, if still alive, has not forgiven us. I hope it will, eventually. Don’t try to carry anything off. Too much data embedded. Don’t want anyone learning what we did. Let the secrets we shouldn’t have learned die with us.”_

Alicia stood up as Illias kept screaming into the comms. “GET OUT OF THERE YOU IDIOTS!” Taldir was out the door, pushing Alicia and Tony ahead of him as he’d grabbed up the data keys. The ship seemed more alive now, more malevolent. It was still silent, and despite knowing the Uncalled wouldn’t be able to have any effect on the electromagnetic spectrum, she could swear that the eerie shadows around the place had to be theirs - they had to be alive, coming for her and Tony. “Turn around. They’re in front of you. Behind you too.” Tony had a hunch, one Alicia would scream at him for later. “Illias, you reverse engineered the translation protocols on the Horizon Signals, right? So we could maybe communicate with these things?”

Oh fuck this was a bad idea.

“Yes...What’s the plan…”

“Just throw the prototype at us.”

“10-4.”

They hadn’t broken pace, and kept approaching what Illias said was a line of Unturned when the “alright, loaded in,” came through the comms.

“We aren’t here to fight! We just wanted to know what happened! We’ve learned the lesson! Do not attack! Do not attack! We’re unarmed.”

The words didn’t come through as sound. They came in a flickering pulse of the eerie lights around them, a flicker of the hum in the strange ship. Nothing happened for a moment - Illias and Njos’s voices came through. “Something shifted. You need to move though. The time dilation is getting worse - that little panicked scream was two hours. Get out of there.”

Alicia and Tony’s bodies were already aching, and they kept running, the docking point even in sight when Illias screamed. “THEY’RE COMING BACK. What do you have!”

The realization clicked right as Alicia and Tony started feeling heavier, and Taldir cursed. “Lose the disks. We have what we need. It’s not worth our lives.” Taldir was keeping a steady pace behind them, as Alicia began lagging, they threw the disks and began slowly staggering towards the docking. 

“Seem to work. They broke off their pursuit. Get out of there.” They moved up and staggered aboard, and Taldir let loose a burst of speed as they got there, the sprint of a Keld unrivaled by other species, and the three collapsed onto the ship, sealing the door and then slowly breathing as Ywyn fired the drives to rip the Searching Wing away from the voidborne tomb of a dead race.


	28. Sit Down

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ritia and her team sit down with Tumin's family. in the "Sicilian accent, talking about "business"" sense of the word "Family."

Approaching the equatorial region of the capitol world of the Vetanari sector made Ritia and her crew nervous – and from the chatter they were getting from the _Talon of Justice_ , Eritox and Ulen weren’t any happier with the situation. Tumin was calm, but that didn’t make the veteran smuggler nor her military backup feel any more reassured – if anything it just made the anxiety more severe. While she and Tumin had worked out a deal, she wasn’t sure she could trust him not to simply turn on her – even though she did have insurance on her life that would make the consequences of her death absolutely miserable on him, it wasn’t as though it would matter to her if it came time to collect on it.

Still, the cybernetic Nathian’s steady gaze out of the viewport as the Laughing Kree came in for docking at the landing zone, and Ritia slowly walked down the ramp, looking confident. Tumin went with her, with the heavily armed Liok and Harriet with them. It wasn’t long after that the Talon came down, and both Iolan, with his coralstave and Eritox, with his heavy weapons, dismounted their own ship as well. As the six walked past the dock agents, one of them, a heavyset Dembra, did a double take at Tumin, and the hacker shook his head. 

“How much do the Jelairs have?”

“Quite a lot – even most of the Guard garrison are getting paid by us on the side. Not that that’s necessarily negative – in the event of attack by other criminal interests, they would be fighting beside us anyway. It’s bad business to let interlopers do damage to civilians in your own area of business, after all – as I suspect the Ghost of Sparta will learn someday, to their sorrow.”

Ritia glanced at him. “What’s wrong with them, Tumin?”

“They don’t often keep faith with other outfits – and they’re far too comfortable with collateral damage for my liking. At any rate, yes, the family have control of a wide range of the officials here – as should any competent crime organization.” Ritia could hardly argue with that, after years of dodging officials and Vilan Proctor Station on her most lucrative hypozine trade route she’d learned that it was much more efficient simply to pay off about a quarter of the staff there and simply move through with her cargo unexamined. 

Harriet’s look of disgust was hidden, Liok’s was not. “Those who sell out their honor learn the price of that at their sorrow, as well. Does it count for so little here that even those sworn to defend the people and law bow to criminals now?”

Tumin took on an expression of scorn. “People or law, pick one, Keld. In places like this, oftentimes my family provides better justice – this far from the Core, the Hegemony are less active than they should be about recalling bad officers – which often means that corruption runs rampant and abuse even worse. We gained control of this garrison when a colonel abusing his authority to get away with brutalizing a Tenebrac took a lancer round in the back of the head from a battalion commander – and that individual was only too happy to help us keep control if it meant that we would do what the command structure had failed to do here – it is always best to work with those recruited from this part of this world – moving people around within the sector does not help here, too many grudges. The Hegemony’s negligence of knowledge about such matters does them no honor. Loosen up.”

Liok growled, but Harriet put a hand on his shoulder and the Keld subsided, still clutching his weapon, glowering around him.

Ritia was increasingly convinced that the ideal of a Keldebriar warrior was something she never wanted to have to work with on a job like this again.

The little slicer guided them along winding streets, through the main roads, coming up on a beautiful looking home that Ritia recognized as a blend of classic Vulpexi and Eshrelia architecture – replicated with great skill by Dembra constructors. She couldn’t help be impressed as Tumin nodded to the guards. The men at the door – three humans, a Tyrsian, and a Tenebrae who Ritia only saw from the corner of her eye as he carefully flanked them. 

“Weapons please.” Ritia handed over her lancer, as well as her knife, while Liok and Harriet were divested of their weapons as well. Ulen winced, but handed over his coralstave, with a strict admonishment not to damage it. Eritox’s weapons were handed over a moment later, and Tumin smiled.

Walking into the main room, well furnished with beautiful paintings and quality rugs, Tumin led them over into an office where, hunched over a desk, a massive Eshrelia sat, almost eerily still. 

Ritia felt an uncomfortable prickle at the back of her neck and felt her crest fluttering against her will. The eerie stillness, the sense of being a fly approaching a spider in his own web – she remembered too well the experience she’d had when she’d flown in the diplomats to parley with the Imperator, back when they’d been the Esharioc, during the worst of the thirty standard years of war that had racked the galaxy leading up to the creation of the Hegemony. This one wasn’t as massive, and lacked the vestigial wings or the sense of pure malevolence that the Imperator had possessed, but the eerie certainty of their bearing was identical.

A Vulpexi wandered into the room and hugged Tumin tightly, and he hugged back. The Eshrelia behind the desk spoke.

“Tumin, my son. What have you brought me?” He extended a claw and opened some sort of fridge under the desk, withdrawing a few things, offering drinks to the group – which they declined, and slowly beginning to take the peel off an orange. 

“Still like the Terran citrus, eh, parent?”

“Quite. Now, son, you’ve been away a while, and I haven’t had much chance to talk to you.”

“Yeah, about that. Got unlucky, then very lucky. I found us some help finding the guy who got Tserin killed.” 

The Eshrelia’s eyes tracked sharply on Ritia. “Oh?” Their sloping head was absolutely still, but it was tilted back to create direct eye contact. “And how did someone who so frequently works on both ends of the law come into contact with my Tumin?”

“Looking for a decent code slicer. His rates were reasonable. I take it that you’re the leader of the Jelairs?”

“Not quite, Ivari. Merely one of their lieutenants. Tumin is my adoptive son, and either I or Rillas Pmini is likely to be the next head, but at the moment that post is held by a Tyrsian – an excellent wartime leader, and given our skirmishes with the Spartans of late one can hardly blame him for staying at the top longer than tradition suggests. But you said you have business to discuss, so let’s talk business. What have you figured out regarding my nibling’s murder?” 

Harriet hid a smile at the Terran word – the Eshrelia were an intersex race, and while they could not self-impregnate without some assistance, the result of identical anatomy had resulted in a lack of gender development as a concept, and when gendered pronouns had been introduced to them, they almost exclusively used non-binary human ones. A touching reminder of the Eshrelia’s dedication to taking part in other cultures and finding their own place within the Hegemony and its peoples. 

“We know that the individual involved came from inside this sector as well. We know that the timeframe of their involvement had to be fairly narrow – and that they have at least some intelligence on the inside of the military to be able to manage some of the arms they were able to distribute, and we know that they were almost certainly in circles adjacent to, but not inside, the ones Tumin ran in on the Net.”

“We had already deduced this much.” Ritia felt her wings grow leaden at the tone the Jelair lieutenant’s voice took – one that clearly indicated he was uninterested in wasting time with someone who could tell him nothing new. “Beyond mere talent as transport or ferreting out secrets, I am unimpressed with this meeting thus far, son. You are not a child. You know better than to be so reckless as to work with Hegemony on an impulse. Adults cannot afford such recklessness.” Tumin winced.

“No. You misunderstand. I didn’t bring them on to help me find who our enemy was – I knew from the day before I left home. I left because we didn’t have the capacity to hunt down the one responsible. Or deal with his allies.” Ritia felt a sinking suspicion in her gut as Tumin’s parent’s tail flickered about in an indication of excited anxiety and the second set of jaws peered out in a predatory expression.

“Even better. They got the profiteering bastards to agree to trade with them, gained some trust. And they helped me lock onto the signal. They have everything I need to bring our enemy down.” Ritia didn’t know what he was talking about until…

Oh, fuck.

“Tumin. Are you telling me that the _Ghost of Sparta_ …”

“Has a code slicer that stirred up a world of trouble for the sole purpose of fomenting a massive crime war and race to find the guilty party with the Hegemony breathing down their necks, all while leaking some of the things that I’d already stolen so that they could let the law do their dirty work – as well as having several of their other enemies weakened from fighting amongst each other? And that I used you to get a bead on them, thinking, initially that I was going to simply let the Hegemony deal with them before I came to a better idea? One that required your help?”

Oh shit. “What help do you need?”

“I need a way to get back on their ship and make a trade with them. They already accept you as someone willing to work with them – and they’re probably moving here as we speak to see what they can do to our assets.”

The Jelair boss seemed to grasp it. 

Ritia saw where it was going. “Would you perhaps be interested in me setting up some sort of trade deal with them?”

He chuckled for a moment. “A bit of trade does help smooth things over. Perhaps a bargain with the law, as well?”

Ulen watched the exchange intently, knowing that he and Ritia understood the Eshrelia don’s plans perfectly - though he was fairly sure that Liok and Harriet would be unhappy with it.


	29. The Carrion Record

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Listening to the final fragment of the Horizon Signal - and trying to figure out the best way of disseminating the information.

The small crew of the _Searching Wing_ gathered around the machine that would play out the recording of the Horizon Signal fragment they’d recovered. They’d been through this drill before, but there was an air of finality to it this time – the Horizon Signal fragment recovered on the _Titan of Carrion_ seemed to be the final installment of the recordings still existing that bore the words of the One-in-Waiting. There was a sense of dread, but also of excitement – if answers existed to the questions they’d seen raised by the madness they’d seen so far, they would be found here, in this record.

“The Firstborn still want to find me, to understand me. After over thirty two thousand cycles of their world around its sun since they first became aware of themselves, after raising themselves back up from nothing no fewer than eight times, they may well have succeeded in besting me. I cannot feel or perceive the universe as I once did – perhaps this should not be surprising. I am certain they define life in accordance with their understanding of it – the way they live. Like many others who I have watched evolve – those who call themselves the Kiriloane,” at this, Ywyn had a visible reaction, crest flaring almost straight up, “the Wanderers, those who have not yet emerged – seem to be composed of cells and matter aligned in a combination of unique molecules singular to organic life, as are the Firstborn and the flora and fauna and microbia they share a world with. I am less finite - I will renew, in pondering my own nature – merely an alignment of my own matter and a flow of energy to create consciousness, and expand that perception and ability to interact. What they know as life is far more finite, far more flickering and delicate in comparison - both in sensation, time and scale.”

The recording paused for a moment. Yywn whispered, awestruck. “It...they remember what my people were before Kyriion. What we called ourselves. We changed our name in mourning for those lost...but this record remembers what we were.” The pilot’s words were surprising, Alicia reflected – it was rare that Ywyn spoke of Ivari as though she still considered herself one of them in a way extending beyond the biological, but in this…

The recording continued.

“My own matter, my coalescence was accidental, and there was always little chance, as I estimated it, that I would always remain in the consciousness I have developed or enjoyed these eons. My dissolution foretells no disaster upon the universe at large. What will be after my dissolution, was before my coalescence, what was after my coalescence will doubtless be again, though I have little knowledge of how long it shall be, or how much of what I sense will have happened by the time matter realigns to form my mind once again. I fear for my children, and what they will do in the aftermath. They obey me out of understanding me only mildly more than the Firstborn truly do – perhaps less. They see my consciousness coming apart and see not inevitability but malice. I can’t deny there is some on the part of the Firstborn – but this would doubtless have occurred, with or without their cursed interference. They have doomed themselves with the ship they have built – their final shelter, their weapon against me, hoping to outrace my children. They have no chance now, when I cease to be. The ship will become their tomb, their demise made only more rapid by the deterioration of “dark” matter left behind when my children perish - it will distort time and gravity aboard that cursed vessel, as singularities would.”

There was a dreadful pause during which the crew reflected on what had occurred – the Uncalled thought they were defending themselves and their father after all. The One-in-Waiting was gone, though. Would have dissolved, regardless.

“I hope, in time, that I shall coalesce again. I deem it likely. What will be, was, what was, will be. These words, among the first I learned when studying the Firstborn’s tongue and hearing how they referred to the cyclic nature of time – so young then, yet so correct in that way, before their hubris led them astray. Those words comfort me now, at the end of my long vigil. When I return, I hope to see the galaxy blazing with life once more. Hope that the death I saw does not claim them all – I feel some joy now, at the end, with the knowledge of what many may become. I am also filled with sorrow for those I know will be lost. To know so many rising will be little more than scattered ash because of the malice of something arising...I don’t doubt the tragedy of accident, now. But neither can I deny its triumph – there are those who will survive it, of this I have even less doubt now. Such will life be – some live, some die. The outer edges of my senses are confused – as though other places, far flung in the universe, may have others like me. I hope to know of them when I coalesce again, as well. To spend eternity forming and dissolving alone as I did this time – I hope next time to have company. To this end, I have seeded more life, as the Firstborn did, and will see eventually if these seeds bore fruit.”

“I see some potential in those that may survive. If allowed to last long enough, they may well ascend someday to be wiser than the Firstborn – to meet with me as equals, before entropy comes for us both. I was the first to come to understand my nature – they will learn to understand themselves. And in time, when the galaxy begins coming apart, I may align to speak again with them as equals – let a new universe be born from a cycle as this one was then. As with all things, I end, and am renewed. What will be was, what was, will be.”

The recording faded out, and Illias spoke. “That’s the end. That’s what we came to understand of the One-in-Waiting. He – she – they – it….Is gone now. The closest thing to a god we can prove, is now gone, likely to come back when the final heat-death is nigh.” 

“I don’t know how “nigh” it will be.” Tony’s voice cut through the quiet that followed the linguist’s statement. For Alicia, the conversation had turned up all sorts of feelings about the death of her parents, the way it spoke of death, the calm acceptance after untold eons of existence. For Tony, it had brought about a querulous tone – one that wanted to argue, though from the tears in the corners of his eyes, she could tell it was haunting him too. “After all, the previous records have been nothing but clear that the One-in-Waiting was a pretty far cry from understanding time even remotely the way we do – and operating on a time scale completely beyond anything we could even begin to comprehend. What seems like “nigh” to it would probably be uncounted billions of years for the rest of us.”

Jessie raised the next question. “But how much do we actually know about what we aren’t supposed to be messing with? We can say that dark matter technology is something we should avoid, but what about gravatic manipulation? Our ships already use that to breach hyperspace to some degree? What’s the delineation at which point we improve them too much and cause trouble for ourselves?”

Njos coughed. “There is a development limit on that, theoretically, that we can reach without massively altering the positioning and composition of dark matter around breaching points, but that could be well past the line or well before it. I suspect simply advising restrictions that stop research at just that point would be ideal - but I’m open to suggestions.”

“What happens when someone, almost inevitably a human,” Ywyn looked at the human crew - “no offense, decides to breach that point? Is the Hegemony meant to sabotage the research? Assassinate the scientists? I don’t think I care for doing the Uncalled’s work for them - and I won’t be party to anything demanding it done.”

Alicia could not deny that it was one of her species most likely to break that taboo - contrary behavior was almost inherent in the species at this point. “Our species will co-operate more if it’s explained why, but there will be others who only want to push the envelope further. I have no idea how to keep that from happening, and I suspect being open that this line of research is prohibited will only add to the risk.”

“And that’s assuming there’s no mass panic. A human is smart. Most, on their own, are smart. Your people as a whole are dangerous, panicky animals when in groups - and you know it.” Alicia glanced at Ywyn at that comment.

“How many pre-FTL Terran movies did my parents show you?”

“Way too many. It may amuse you to know that the Ballchinnians may actually have existed.” 

There was a long pause before Ywyn gave a laughing trill. “Kidding, of course, but it was funny to get you like that for a second. Anyway. There are issues with the amount of information people can have…” She trailed off, as though considering something, then resumed. “But at the same time, letting people wander through this blind is going to lead to problems - and a lot of unethical controls.”

“It could be a clearance solution.” Jessie was the one speaking then. “Tell those at the top of research institutions of the situation, and ensure that anything getting too close to the unacceptable risk is never funded or permitted by them. That’ll probably lead to someone digging in further, later, from what my dad told me of the Marauder War is to be believed, but for right now it’ll be a functional stopgap to keep things from going too far.”

“Telling that to some people might get the desired result, but the precursors got slapped back to the stone age apparently eight times before getting wiped out entirely, and then proceeded to make the Sclunter - a hostile species they’d specifically built with epigenic triggers that would make them hyperevolve to be a nigh-uncontrollable force of violent brutes that they would never be able to get back on a leash - just to avoid taking the actual point. I don’t think we’d be dumb enough to make new monsters, but if you think someone wouldn’t fuck up in an equally appallingly stupid manner to sate their own hubris you’re kidding yourself.” That was Tony.

“Maybe, but there can be protocols to disseminate information as it goes so that the colleagues of anyone insane enough to try anything close to that can simply be sabotaged - I don’t like it, but I like a new Sclunter or a brush with undetectable warriors who quite literally punch black holes into people a lot less.” That was Dolch, the normally stolid Dembra.

“That would only risk making it worse, if their colleagues agreed with them. And have you ever heard Endirmas complain about competitive scholars? At least one would go further out of spite at being denied the chance to prove their pet theory.” Illias’s voice was gentle, but there was a cutting edge to it.

Taldir waved. “I suspect we’ll have to table that for the time being, and before anyone objects, I mean we’ll come back to it at the end of this conversation. The matter of what we’ve learned of the Sclunter’s origins just came up, and as the press is quite interested in that information, and has been since the revelations about their genome that emerged in the war, I suspect we will have to have some idea of how to frame that before we deal with how much to talk about the rest.”

Ywyn had been prepared to argue with Taldir’s forced tabling of the discussion, but she couldn’t deny that point. “For the moment, it may be adequate to say that the Sclunter were a weapon created out of fear, and specially bred to fight something the Precursors couldn’t - something that we don’t fully understand. Something that probably won’t be an issue for the modern galaxy, given what we’ve learned thus far.” She didn’t like the half-truth represented there, but the complication of trying to figure out how to explain all of this to avert disaster was honestly a greater headache.

“Probably” isn’t the kind of word that averts paranoia and panic - and we’ve seen enough of that, I think.”

Ywyn shook her head. “I have ways of making sure the information is disseminated - what I was looking into on my own leave. There are ways of keeping truth from being too poisonous if we’re clever and release it in digestible chunks.”

“What ways are those?”

“You’re happier not knowing, Lieutenant. Suffice to say I was involved in more than one mission on the Hegemony’s behalf around informational security. I don’t know that the agency that asked for my help on that front wants me talking about it yet.”

Taldir’s tail flicked in acknowledgement. “Aye. I can believe that. Useful to have connections on both ends, though. I leave that to you and your other contacts, then.” The Keld was clearly curious, but managed to restrain himself. “I think we have what we need, knowledge-wise to secure the safety of the Hegemony. We’ll forward our findings to the government – I’ll include a recommendation that Gravalax be left alone and undisturbed, never to be colonized. We have no business toying with the graves of ancients – I don’t want to disturb any secrets that would cause trouble. Whether or not the One-in-Waiting is gone, its children are not, and they have nothing left to call them off – presumably the reason for the name. We can’t fight them, and we learned what we needed to. We’ve learned more about the history of the galaxy and the origins of life than anyone else – and I think history will be happy for what we bring it.”

There was a quiet moment. “I suspect we’ve accomplished all that could be reasonably hoped - seen things no other mortal person ever has, and likely that no one else ever will.” 

Alicia’s voice was quiet as she reflected on the years she’d spent aboard the ship, riding event horizons, boots down on planets nothing living had touched in eons, flying through the Tempest sector. She’d already had several lifetimes worth of adventure.

And she could already tell, she wasn’t done. That wasn’t how her family worked. You finished one adventure, rested enough to recover, and charged off to the next.

As they prepared to head back to the Core, Taldir asked Ywyn one question. “Oh, off the record, Ensign. If it is okay to ask. What led them to ask your help?”

“My honesty. They needed someone with credibility in both the Hegemony and more anti-authortiarian circles, and my past with my father…”

Taldir laughed. “Your integrity, of course. Your most admirable trait. I look forward to seeing how it plays out here then, Ywyn.”


	30. Ritia's Gambit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ritia matches wits with the captain of the Ghost of Sparta

The vicious crackle of baneslayer carbines and ripper submachine guns rattled around Ritia as her and the team desperately attempted to get the _Laughing Kree_ started up to escape the pursuing mobsters. “Eritox, get the goods secured. Harriet, Liok, lay down a suppressive fire – we set down in warehouse zones for a reason, there won’t be civvies here to worry about.”

The hum and snap of their own weapons started working, even as a baneslayer round burst against the hull of the Kree, Ulen swore and ducked. “Ritia, we have to take off!”

“Trying. Help Eritox get the bay secured and locked. I don’t want to find out we have a stowaway!”

Liok and Harriet switched off, even as the shots kept coming, and the hatch finally sealed, the little team flinging off some last spiteful shots at the mob pursuing them as the smuggling ship took off.

They weren’t going to have much time to make the rendevous, only two standard days to meet up on schedule – and they doubted the Ghost of Sparta would be interested in sticking around – it would be such a shame if that bit of theater wound up being for naught after all this.

*****Two Standard Days prior*****

“So, the first thing to be aware of, since the Captain of the _Ghost of Sparta_ is no fool, we have to assume that he recognized Tumin and thinks that we’re with the Jelairs. There’s no way they’d be interested in making a trade with us of any kind without some evidence that we aren’t playing an angle for the Jelairs. So we’re going to steal a few tens of thousands of credits of weapons and drugs from the Jelairs, and offer to sell it off to the Spartans. They probably have observers, so we’re going to have to have pursuit and a narrow escape. Some degree of pursuit into space would be good, as well.”

*****Now*****

The _Laughing Kree_ swept away with the actinic blasts of the Jelair ships’ firing blazing around behind them. They weren’t going to fail. Those tracking chips were deliberately set to be slightly haywire – missiles and torpedoes detonating well before effective range, or slewing off to detonate harmlessly outside the planet’s lunar orbit. “Ullen, check the display, time to hyperdrive engine warmed and ready?”

“One minute. If Tumin isn’t playing in good faith, we’ll know by then.”

“No we won’t. We’ll know if he’s going to backstab us after we know if the _Ghost_ has been taken down.” Not that she was too worried – there were still the dead drops she’d left – ones he couldn’t locate in time if he betrayed her. And he still wanted to be able to operate with someone he trusted. Ritia had gotten the fuzzy cyborg into contact with Ywyn, and he wasn’t likely to betray her now if he saw a way clear. Especially since she’d been quite clear that if she didn’t survive this, Ywyn was to burn him to the ground.

Still, a “lightscythe” laser scored a glancing shot, and Ritia got nervous as she saw the hull temperature go up as the ship’s shields diffused the energy of the hit across the ship. Not all the pursuers could have been made aware of the gambit – in fact, none of them had. There was too much chance of one of them being one of the Spartans’ informers. What had they said on that broadcast during their terror raids against the Esharioc during the Incursion? “We Spartans are good at corrupting the otherwise loyal.” They were famous for turning other criminal outfits workers to them, and while they hadn’t actually turned any Esharioc, they had kicked off a panicked crackdown among them, of the Esharioc damaging their own war production looking for traitors.

Still, the _Ghost of Sparta_ and its crew had managed to avoid the law and the military alike for the better part of thirty standard years – they’d popped up around the time of the Alliance-Federation War. They’d stayed alive this long, running drugs, guns, slaves, though that last only very, very rarely because of the risk, and they were still around. In some ways, and in terms of technique, they represented the pinnacle of smugglers and pirates.

If Ritia was going to bring them down, this needed to go off without a hitch, and the Spartans absolutely could not know what she was planning.

The ship finally jumped to warp, the stars becoming back pinpricks against the stark, eerie white of hyperspace as the ship began burrowing through the universe. Ritia offhandedly wondered why this wasn’t trespassing on the secrets the Precursors had disturbed but dark matter drawing crossed a line. “Alright. Phase one, complete. Get some rest, everyone. We’ll check for trackers on the hull once we get out of hyperspace.”

*****Two Standard Days Ago*****

“We cannot be pursued to the rendezvous. Tumin, what kinds of trackers does your family have to work with?”

“A few.”

“Do you know how to disable all of them?”

“Yes. There’s a way of screwing around with shields to glitch them all – and once that’s done, I can reprogram them to deactivate when they boot back up. You will have to be prepared to collect and jettison them so that the Spartans don’t spot them, though. If they see or even detect the damn things, they’re smart enough to scatter. But they’d be suspicious if they can’t pick up residual ionizing magnetic charge from where you detached them, either. They’ll never believe we got that sloppy.”

***Now***

Ritia’s quick play of stress relief with Ulen, followed by a sixteen standard-hour nap, wound up getting her well-rested by the time they reached the rendezvous point. “Alright. Voidsuits on. Ulen, send the message to Tumin, let him now that now’s the time to deactivate the trackers. Me and Eritox will be clearing them off the hull.”

Ulen sent the message, and Tumin’s irritated voice came back. “Give me two minutes, and you can get out and detach them. Do not touch the things until then - you don’t want to know what happens when you try to detach active ones.” Gave Ritia more than enough time to get suited up and prepare to depressurize the airlock with her and Eritox inside. Tumin’s voice came back through, informing them that it was time to exit the ship and remove the trackers. Ritia and Eritox began doing so - carefully, because the tools to take these things off without risking tearing open bits of your hull were expensive and Ritia had had to pay an obscene amount of money to get ones as good as she had. 

Still, the trackers drifted off into space when detached, and Ritia got back into her beloved ship. Everyone took a moment to prepare for the meeting, Eritox and Ulen hiding in a part of the hull that the Spartans wouldn’t see or be able to pick up on scanners - they hadn’t been part of the crew last time, and bounty hunters would draw attention she didn’t want to. Liok and Harriet indulged in a friendly sparring match, but Ritia looked out of the viewport, pondering her last big mission like this for the Hegemony.

“Shaed, Adisa, Prian? You always said you wanted someone to put out the effort to actually bring the Spartans down. I know their captain got the best of the three of you during your years in the private sector, just once, and that you never quite forgave him for that. Don’t worry though. This was the ship you guys helped me buy, so hopefully you’re with me in spirit enough to see what’s about to happen. The _Ghost of Sparta_ is about to go down. Not necessarily how you’d have wanted - but Shaed, I’ve learned a bit more about your past since the Incursion. I know you did some work for the Jelairs, years ago. So here goes nothing. Hopefully you can take some satisfaction.”

She zoned out for a time - what a human would call “Zenning” - before the sensors screamed that another ship, the infamous renegade strike cruiser, had just dropped out of hyperspace. Her crest ruffled, but she took a breath and forced herself to remain calm. Wouldn’t do to screw up the plan now.

*****One Standard Day Ago*****

“Are you sure this’ll work?”

“No reason it wouldn’t. The Spartans are the type to try something reckless if you take away their ability to hide. They’ll go down hard, but they will go down. You have to remember, they’ve been doing this for a long time. Have a captain well into his eighties - still as fit and as brutal as ever, but he’s slowing down, and there’s no end of cult of personality around him and his wife. If they believe they can’t get out of this, they’ll make one last run for glory.”

“Sound unprofessional.”

Tumin had laughed at that. “Absolutely. But in a way, the Spartans are the most professional in this business. They’ve never been captured, and despite being one of the most numerically inferior illicit businesses in the galaxy, they’ve been punching well above their weight for decades - and they command fear and dread throughout the Vetenari sector. I’d take death over captivity - most who clawed their way to power out here would, at this point. Don’t ever forget that.”

“The plan is simple,” Ritia had said to her crew. “We offer the Spartans weapons we stole from the Jelairs, and information about the Jelair’s plans. We lead them to believe that the battlegroup they’ve likely picked up on scanners by this point - the one built around the Dreadnaught _Invictus_ , that is - is moving to take power from the Jelairs after they crossed one line too many. Thanks to Harriet and Liok, I have some communication codes for Invictus, and if I know anything about Silvanus Hanes, he’s not going to pass up the chance to finally bring the Spartans down. The Spartans buy the weapons and drugs from us, figuring to sell them somewhere else. We play the smart smuggler, passing illicit gear stolen from one outfit to another, bailing on former employers for stabbing us in the back. When we leave, and they sweep for trackers, we detonate the charges. Eritox, Ulen, explain the weapons you brought.”

“Standard for disabling a ship without killing it or anyone aboard. It’ll scramble their hyperdrive capacity by screwing with the gravatic field manipulation around the ship that lets it survive hyperspace. Better yet, it’ll disable stealth fields. Shields and weapons may also be affected but they aren’t going to be offline long - and neither is standard spaceflight going to be offline or even difficult. Sadly, it’s all we’ll have a chance to do - detonation sequences, coupled with the chemical reads they’ll do for explosive primers, will let them spot any actual explosives.”

*****Now*****

The _Ghost of Sparta_ allowed Ritia to dock with them. She stepped aboard, looking nervous - deliberately no more so than a smuggler would having just escaped one outfit and looking to sell her ill-gotten gains to another. Harriet and Liok flanked her as they had before. The pirates, led by a Vulpexi lady and a cold-eyed human with greying hair and an aging face, eyes deep set in a face weathered and scarred from years of life as a pirate. The two of them had a sense of quiet fury, of confidence, even if the human had clearly gotten some access to gene therapy that had allowed him to maintain fitness in age. 

“Well, for once the unimpeachable renegade Ivari breaks contract. The Jelairs must have really crossed you. Whatever did they try?”

“Ever date a Galri?” She flicked her wingtips suggestively.

The captain looked back at her. “What? Why?”

“Nothing. I did, for a long time. The Jelairs’ behavior towards them was disgusting enough that I find it difficult to work with them. Didn’t help that they abruptly spiked the prices for some of the things I was trying to get from them to move. Normally bad business practices will simply lead to me avoiding working with you - couple it with disrespect for me or my colleagues and well...I’m sure you understand that that sort of disrespect is something it’s just poor practice to let anyone get away with undamaged.”

The Vulpexi woman gave an evil little chuckle and bobbed her eyestalks. “I can appreciate that. We’ve had a few fights over lack of respect - and with your lack of manpower, I can certainly appreciate theft instead of bloodshed. Our informants mentioned that little firefight.”

Ritia nodded, and then forced herself to remain calm when the male spoke, “Though, our informants also mentioned that two others went aboard your ship on escape. A Galri and a Tyrsian - ones who arrived in a separate ship from you. Care to explain that?”

Ritia turned and let her crest flare in disgust. “Yes. That would be my lover and his bodyguard. Their own ship was captured by the Jelairs, and they clearly intended to force some form of indenture on the poor bastard to get him working for them via sabotage of the ship. Clearly they missed the memo that just because Galri don’t like machines doesn’t mean they know nothing of them.”

“Ah. I take it you held them back, out of concern you’d make us paranoid about ambush? I feel as though you could have been much more disarmed by simply calling them out now.” The pirate captain’s voice had an edge to it, though the words were still polite as ever. 

Ritia sighed as Eritox and Ulen stepped out of their hiding places. “Fair enough. Now, we have six hundred kilos of Euphozine, forty six of Cortalspice, a few palettes of ammunition, a few charge packs for lightscythe ship weapons - actually, is the Ghost of Sparta equipped with those weapons or am I going to have to sell those elsewhere?”

The captain chuckled. “Lucky day for us. Got some of those retrofitted in only a few standard years ago. As to the drugs - we’ll buy them for the price you should have been paying to the Jelairs. And we have somewhere we can sell them for about what they wanted to supply you for. Credits have to come from somewhere.”

Ritia laughed, not even having to force it. “Normally I’d try to haggle up, but since I got this lot for free….I think we can agree on this. You get cheap ammunition and drugs to sell, I make money for nothing and get my own payback on the Jelairs, and we remain on good enough terms. I take it you’d like to offload the merchandise? You’re welcome aboard the moment we have money.”

The Spartans got through the transfer, then began speaking easily with Ritia over a game of cards while the crew offloaded the cargo to their own ship. Ritia was losing - which was a pity, as she thought she was pretty good at cards.

Not that it would matter shortly.

“Hey, Captn’! We’ve got some explosive gear on this thing - LENS-signal detonated charges.”

The captain turned to Ritia, furious, and without skipping a beat, she gave the answer. “What, you think I’d be dumb enough, after a betrayal like that, NOT to include insurance when dealing with pirates? I thought you respected me. Don’t worry, as usual, we have the codes you use to disable them. And you get them the instant we’re no longer docked with you - don’t worry. We’ll be in weapons range if it looks like we’re playing you false. You can even have your techies look over the insurance charges - they’re delayed detonation for a reason. Namely - I don’t want to lose another client if I don’t absolutely have to. Not enough pay properly.”

*****One Standard Day Before Operation*****

“No, we need to have explosives in. We told them, honestly, last time that timed detonation explosives are a common insurance among smugglers dealing with pirates. One we used last time. We need to have them planted - make it obvious, so they see the trap they’ll look for and know it’s the exact same one we use as insurance. Have the disablers wired underneath that. Tumin, can you wire the signal so that the two will transmit between each other when the actual bombs are disarmed? Set off the disabler then?”

The Nathian hacker had let out a bark of laughter. “You’re right, that’s a much better idea. They’ll expect some sort of trap, finding nothing will absolutely make them paranoid. Especially after the last encounter.”

“How will they not pick up the battlegroup’s signatures on their scanners?”

“I wouldn’t worry. In the packet I gave them last time, I had a worm. It’s been dormant until now. I’m bringing it online today. It’ll keep them from picking up the group, but it shouldn’t look abnormal otherwise.”

*****Now*****

The pirate gave a respectful nod. “Of course. How could I have forgotten our last meeting? Impressed that you had time to rig that up.”

“We did arrive a day ahead of you - as is standard for people in my business.”

“Oh really? You know, it’s funny, for all I deal with smugglers, I never knew that. I suppose it makes sense. Now, I think, if I’m not much mistaken, that we’ve offloaded the majority of your merchandise, yes?”

Ritia escorted him down to her cargo bay. “Not quite. One palette left. Eritox, could you..?”

The Tyrsian nodded and hefted the box, carrying it aboard the Ghost, but not before the Captain had swept it for armed explosive signatures. 

“Well then. Good luck, smuggler.” 

Ritia looked at her watch - according to the intel she’d gotten, and the data Tumin had stolen, the _Invictus_ battle group would be here in twenty standard minutes. 

She shook the captain’s hand, and that of his wife, before she and her team got back on the _Laughing Kree_ and dis-docked. 

Fifteen minutes.

They’d gotten away from the _Ghost of Sparta_ , but before leaving weapons range, she hailed the pirates. “Alright. The code is 197Z24860V31-9PY-104L89325B.” The pirates nodded and input the code while she brought her own ship to a halt not far from the ship - she wanted to be able to let them see she was operating in good faith. 

Until it became obvious that she wasn’t. Their weapons would be back online five minutes after the pulse went through, which meant they’d be back able to fire for three minutes before the battlegroup stumbled on them. Tumin was already playing hell with the scanners with the bug he’d already put there in the previous intel package. The worm had to have come online by now - they’d have been caught if it hadn’t.

A stream of profanity came from the other ship as the pulse went across the renegade strike cruiser. Ritia figured that was as good a time as any to jump to hyperspace - just as she noted the first corvettes of the battlegroup appearing on the edge of her scanner range.

****

The _Ghost of Sparta_ faced its final battle. The damned smuggler had betrayed them - doubtless with aid from the Hegemony. Or from the Jelairs. Perhaps karma from their slaving before the current captains, or perhaps grudges, or perhaps for bounty. Their guns would come back online, but the captain looked over his displays, and realized that their warp drives and their cloaking wouldn’t be online fast enough to matter. The battlegroup was coming around to crush them, and for a moment, he easily ran a hand across the exposed skin left by his wife’s armored carapace. He glanced over the two ships’ doctors, mute Nathians who they’d met years ago, who’d only rarely explained anything about their past via sign language or text. The two had become like a family for the vicious old pirate, and their apparent innocence had proven invaluable when he’d needed to outgambit the indomitable Adisa and her assorted employers.

Still, as he watched the _Invictus_ battlegroup appear, he thought on what Ritia had done. It had been a perfect gambit, well played, well planned, well thought out, and he had to admit, even now, that he was impressed. It had been perfect.

Not that anything less could have taken his ship.

“Alright, rogues. Listen up.” he sent the message out over the ship’s hailer. “We’ve been betrayed and suckered. We have no FTL capacity and will not for several hours, and our cloaking is likewise disabled. Our shields, weapons, and standard space flight are all fully operational. We will not have the time to get our downed systems back online. A Hegemonic Navy battle group is present in the system - if you wish to take what escape pods we possess and jettison in stasis, I will not hold it against you. This will be our last stand.” He let a crack come through his voice. “Our days as slavers before the wife and I took the ship over have caught up to us. I know many of you joined on because you had nowhere else to go. I know we’ve done a lot of things, both impressive and regrettable, together. If you want to stay, man the shields, steady on the helm, and get weapons targeting ready.” 

Not a single pirate, not a single Spartan, so much as twitched towards the escape pods. They’d chosen. They’d stand with their ship, their captain, and the operation that had become their lives and family. 

“Alright. Well then.” 

He hailed the _Invictus_. “This is Captain Titinicus of the Ghost of Sparta. You are doubtless about to close the noose on our necks. Before you bother offering us any plea deals for surrender, any mercy, know that your offer is preemptively rejected. We lived as Spartan pirates, we’ll die as Spartan pirates. And I know that a human is in command of that fleet. Meaning you know how Spartans die.” 

The ship reported weapons online, and the hail was cut off as the Fleet began encircling them and the Ghost began maneuvering. “Target the flagship. I always wanted to see if we could take a dreadnought. Especially one commanded by Shiloh Hendrix’s last student. No matter what happens, this is one for the history books.”


	31. Debrief

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Crew of the Searching Wing celebrates the end of their mission and makes their report.

The _Searching Wing_ ’s crew prepared to debrief with command, and the atmosphere was tense. They knew they would have to give a report of their findings of the Horizon Signal, the Precursors’ technology and their hubris, all of it. They had discussed their options about what they thought should be revealed to the general public, but the reality was that the ultimate decision would be made well above their paygrade.

Ywyn wasn’t in the best of moods – some of her other mission had been declassified enough to share it with the team, but she wasn’t sure how much she wanted to explain to the hidebound Taldir or the prissy Illias about how she was now working with a member of the notorious Jelair consortium.

They’d been back in stable communication for some time now, and had just gotten some new news.

“The renegade strike cruiser, _Ghost of Sparta_ , has been engaged and decisively destroyed by the naval battle group built around Paramount-class dreadnought _Invictus_. While the pirates fought impressively, the ship was defeated by the battlegroup, commanded by Rear Admiral Silvanus Hanes, the man considered the best still-living understudy of Vice Admiral Shiloh Hendrix. When asked about the event, Hanes informed us that some inter-criminal clash had rendered the ship unable to escape – and that it still put up “a hell of a fight – but you’d expect given its ability to give the entire navy the runaround for the better part of thirty standard years.”

Alright, that was clearly the best mood Taldir was going to be in for some time, based on the leonine grin he had at the news. The Ivari ace had been on more than one attempt at cornering the legendary pirates, but they’d always managed to slip away, and she felt sure that the military Keld had no less pride in the idea of the pirates finally having been brought down after the amount of trouble they’d caused.

Ywyn pondered telling the Keld now, but decided against it. Right now, they had to be focused on the report they were going to be giving to High Command in but a few hours.

***

The small team stood in the debriefing room, and for a moment Ywyn took in the appearance of the room, tempted to make a joke about if the Hegemony High Command had watched a little too much of a certain thoroughly insane animated series of old Terra, based on both the layout of the room and its lighting, with the massive monitors, the red light, the strange, circular array of high command around those being debriefed. Then again, the old Captain and Lieutenant hadn’t really liked watching that one too much – hell, even Ywyn herself had found it a little too on the nose, psychologically speaking.

At the thought of High Command watching old Terran anime to try to determine if they wanted to go all in on the aesthetic to keep people too nervous to lie, Ywyn was barely able to keep herself from giggling.

In retrospect, she figured, she never should have been promoted high enough to interact with High Command.

Alicia was slightly intimidated by High Command, but she knew they were working their way up the ranks, and she was next.

“As my companions have said, on the Precursor homeworld of Gravalax, we discovered a great deal of evidence that the Precursors had tampered with the evolution of several species – oftentimes seeking to figure out of the One-in-Waiting had been involved in the process, while they were out. We came to incontrovertible evidence that the Precursors were the ones behind making the Sclunter, in hopes of countering the Uncalled – those entities that Operation: Sundered Shadow encountered aboard the _Titan of Carrion_. Said entities were the ones who devastated the Precursor’s civilization, multiple times, in an attempt to protect the One-in-Waiting from certain dangers presented by the technological thresholds the Precursors were crossing.”

“And in your view, what were these thresholds, Explorer?”

“As I have said, I am not an expert in any of the requisite fields to answer that question. I highly advise asking Njos, Dolch, or Jessie Jaegar, given that they were on the expedition and have more relevant knowledge in that field.”

The High Command looked at one another before actually taking the suggestion, and began drilling the other members of the crew regarding the technological suspicions and revelations granted by the Precursors’ ruins. Jessie answered to her ability, but the three ultimately presented a fairly solid wall of the same answers - despite High Command all but interrogating the trio of physics- and engineering-minded crew to expose any holes in their logic. It wasn’t malicious, Alicia knew, but an attempt to make absolutely certain that the top officials in the military and scientific governing bodies understood the situation to the best of their ability - not that the scientific part of the Hegemonic Council would not be going over every spec of data recovered with a microscope.

“From your estimation, Lt. e’Klae, do you see any reason to be concerned of a further military threat from the experiments of the Precursors?”

“Negative. I think that absent some truly awful judgement around pushing limits already discussed in the engineers’ report, we’re not going to have any concern there. Though you may want to ask Paenirc - his prior service was Intelligence.”

“I actually agree with the Lieutenant. Though the Precursors’ paranoia and the risk of really getting more intel off the _Titan of Carrion_ were sufficiently extreme that we could not get a complete read, there is nothing to indicate the Precursors left any threat that would have survived to the modern day - and even less to suggest that the Uncalled would mount an attack unprovoked - they may be entirely contained in the _Titan_ and similar hulks, though that is conjecture resulting from both what we learned of the purpose of that ship and its unintended functions, as well as their utter absence from Gravalax.”

“We can see where that conclusion may come from. However, we will not be taking chances on that basis. Per Taldir’s recommendation, the Titan of Carrion will remain avoided, and automated defense platforms will be mounted in orbit around Gravalax, solar powered and with the intent of neutralizing anything that goes near it with extreme prejudice - there is little to nothing to be gained there beyond genetic data and technology whose reverse engineering would apparently put Galactic peace at dire risk.”

Iolan shook his head. “Negative. Gravalax is actually sterile - outside specific laboratory zones that stud the planet, you’d recover almost no genetic information, and most of what you could gain could be organically obtained through Galri biological study.”

“Are there any useful alloy analyses that may be extracted from that planet?”

“Potentially, though again, we run the risk of angering the Uncalled. I don’t think we’d lose anything by taking chemical samples, but anything that shows presence of mass shadow in hyperspace even when occupying realspace is probably not something we should try to reverse-engineer or replicate.” Dolch’s answer was rumbled out, and the council then asked the question that Alicia had been dreading.

“The decision about dissemination of data relating to the Sclunter will likely be made without further input - we believe we have what we need in that regard. This is the chance you have to make any suggestions about the nature of the Precursor civilization and how the information gets disseminated?”

There was a long pause before Tony spoke - “I think the upper ranks of the academic sphere should be informed, and whatever backchannels any of you have to disseminate the information to criminal enterprises that would have the resources to mount a treasure hunting expedition may need to be utilized as -” Ywyn’s talon dug painfully into his arm.

“My department, kid. I do concur with the Andala, however, I think there needs to be careful vetting about who knows - and I think those informed need to have a very clear understanding of just how dangerous the Uncalled are - if anyone thinks they’re going to punch out Cthulhu, they need to know that a civilization our scientifically minded friends rated as orders of magnitude more advanced and populous than ours attempted it and never managed anything more than a brief, hard-fought respite between catastrophically one sided massacres. We. Cannot. Beat the Uncalled. We aren’t going to be able to get out of the consequences of anything like this via technology or valor - we need to stay clear of this. No way around it.”

The Council took that under advisement, before nodding. “Understood. Illias, we trust that you could inform your cousin of at least some of the reasons he will not be getting the tell-all he hoped for? Though I don’t suppose many will mind information from the Horizon Signal - though we suspect there is some risk of cults rising around the galaxy if that particular aspect is revealed. However, only so much can ethically be concealed - and knowledge of something like that serves little concrete good and only serves to suppress the truth - an unacceptable behavior, especially given that at least three people in this room would leak that anyway.”

Alicia, Tony and Ywyn didn’t even bother pretending to be ashamed. 

“For the purposes of now, the Precursor investigation has been disbanded. You are all free to return to your original branches of service, or to apply for honorable discharge. However, this mission has come to a close. We trust you will be discrete going forward - except Ensign Ywyn, who we expect to be discrete in so far as her capacity as a liaison with the intelligence service regarding information. Dismissed.”

Alicia had been waiting to hear all those words, but even as she looked at Tony, she realized the reason had less to do with danger and more to do with desire to be back to what they’d actually enlisted to do - see new worlds, new life in the galaxy. They had no idea when the _Khan_ would be ready, but if they were allowed to put in a recommendation for the pilot, they already had a suggestion. The idea of being separated from the rest of the task force wasn’t a pleasant one, though. Over the two and a half (human) years they’d spend together, the task force had become like a separate family - even the hard-eyed Keld had been nothing but sympathetic after the deaths of their parents, and it was impossible to spend that much time with people in a comparatively small ship like the Searching Wing without getting close to them and coming to understand and even enjoy some of their quirks. 

Still. They had a job to do. As the little group walked out of the debrief, Tony spotted a bar, and Taldir followed his gaze. “Well. I’m no longer the officer for any of you. A drink to celebrate the mission, anyone? On me. I hear humans get attached a bit - figure one last night as a group could be a good send-off for one of the most impressive mission teams I’ve ever had.”

There was a pause. Alicia followed Taldir. Paenirc did the same. Dolch, Iolan, Njos, Jessie, Oppa, Ywyn and Illias followed suit. “Alright then.”

***

The music was pumping, the party was good. Iolan seemed to be drunkenly dancing with Oppa, a contrast of heights that would have been the most hilarious thing in the room if not for the contrast offered by the dense-boned Njos dancing with the lithe and technically invertebrate Paenirc. Tony was chatting up Taldir about the Keld’s future plans, while Taldir himself seemed to be remarkably eager to impress some final advice on Tony he’d learned from his own prior service, getting a little bit high as they did so. Jessie Jaegar had sat down next to Alicia, and talked. “You know, Alicia, I don’t actually have much in the way of my service left - honestly, I don’t have to reenlist with my old service, at this point. That said, I heard a lot from my dad about the _Khan_ , from a time your parents, him, and Shiloh had a bit of a banquet aboard it. If you’re looking for a ship’s engineer for the old beast, I’m game.” Alicia felt a smile tug at her lips. “I’ll take it under advisement.”

Ywyn was next. “Hey. I’m going to be out of contact for a while, and I don’t know how long my hitch as an intel liaison’s going to last. Hopefully you and I see each other again, kid.”

Alicia shrugged. “Tony and I didn’t really inherit Mom and Dad’s piloting. We’re both passable - they insisted on making sure we were that - but if we get the _Khan_ , we’re going to need a pilot. If you’re looking for a new position, and you feel like working with a shorter-lived species again…Consider it, would you?”

Ywyn’s feathers flicked around her wings and her talons clicked on the table. “I’m already considering it. Good luck, Alicia.” 

Alicia smiled as the party went on, and she realized that she really had cemented her own legacy with this one - hers, and Tony’s. Her parents’ legend still shone, and she never wanted it to dim. 

But she couldn’t deny, she and Tony had definitely started shining for themselves, as well. And with a team of their own. Hopefully, it was going to keep looking up. 


	32. Onward into Twilight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ritia reflects on the job, her past, and her future

Ritia leaned back after her fun time with Ulen. Newsfeeds were still spitting information about the battle with the Ghost of Sparta against the Invictus battlegroup, the devastation that had been wrought in the battle. Surprising no one for such a deadly ship, the Ghost had given a real fight of it, even against a full naval fleet before finally being destroyed. She idly raised a glass at the thought - more and more of the pirates in the galaxy were being brought down, and that one had more of a legend behind it than the rest. Someday, she knew, probably not in her long lifetime, smuggling would be harshly limited by the Navy as well. “Good luck to them, wherever they wound up. Doubtless I’ll see them there someday.” She didn’t bother thinking of how they’d react to seeing her again - such coldblooded dealings were all too common in her field, to the degree that it was often said people developed a reputation for keeping their bargain by never leaving anyone who could report otherwise able to do so. Still…they had gone down hard, and she couldn’t help but admire their tenacity against the Navy, as one of the last real legendary pirate crews cut down by the military’s efforts to bring law and peace to even the depths of space. They’d taken two destroyers, three cruisers, and even mauled the Invictus badly enough that it’d be getting repaired for almost a standard year before it was back to full capacity.

The Jelairs now had greater control of the crime rings in the Vetenari sector, but Ritia felt satisfied with what she’d accomplished. Tumin had been good to his word, even as reports had come through that the unit tasked with probing the secrets of the Precursors had returned and filed a full report, the Nathian had contacted Ywyn before saying anything. Ritia wasn’t totally sure what he would leak and what he wouldn’t, but the Punkhawk spoke well enough of their conversations that the smuggler was happy with the result. Harriet and Liok had left, a few standard weeks prior, gone back to the military, which was a pity.

Running down a rogue element, playing out desperate gambits in hopes of getting a breakthrough, staying one step ahead of or behind a brilliant opponent – it had reminded her of the days when she’d been working with Adisa and her crew, before the Incursion. She missed the Viper, and Prian, and Shaed, Owen, and Doakes. Harriet had learned from Adisa, and in some ways it showed, enough to tickle Ritia’s memory. Liok was prickly enough to rouse memories of Prian - though by the end, Prian had loosened up enough that she suspected he’d have been a good one to have talk to her more recent Keldebriar companion. Still, Liok would likely have improved in time. There was a part of Ritia, deep-down, that wished Liok and Harriet would have stayed on with her for a while, enjoyed the life she lived. Come to see it all as Adisa, Prian and Shaed had, fourteen standard years ago, after Murdoch, before the Incursion.

But no. They had their place in the galaxy, and she had hers. Per usual, the Hegemony offered her a commission to serve as a Lieutenant in Naval Intelligence, and per usual, Ritia had refused - though she’d taken the money they offered for the job. She had no need of any such accolades, but credits were always good. Ulen and Eritox were working with her now, and she’d heard rumors of a lucrative deal she could go chase while her bounty hunting lover and his friend went after some cartel or another. Tumin had already waved her farewell and now, watching the capital world of the Vetenari sector fade away from the viewport through her window as she and Ulen got dressed, she couldn’t help but wonder if that was the last she’d hear of the undersized hacker.

Or Ywyn.

Ritia was older than Ywyn, had, prior to the expedition, likely seen more of the galaxy. But until the Punkhawk’s career had taken off, and Ritia had gotten the attention of Adisa, the smuggler would never have imagined she could have respect she couldn’t command by being too good to ignore. Renegade Ivari rarely did. But that had changed, and she wanted to think it was in part because of her own work, and that of Ywyn, that it had. Their chats over the years had been meaningful to both of them, Ritia thought, her giving Ywyn advice after her initial exile, Ywyn encouraging her to attempt to be more after Ywyn had gained some early accolades in formal service. And now, she’d gotten an excuse to spend time with her more often - or at the least, communicate more.

Even as she prepared to take her own place at the helm, Ritia looked down at the console, and noticed she was already getting messages from Ywyn. “Speak of a starwarp, and one shall appear.”

“You weren’t kidding about this guy, were you, operative? Lot of questions, not a lot of restraint. Good for him though. Think your little whistleblower friend and I will get along real well. ~ Ywyn. PS. Why the fuck do humans call that a whistleblower anyway? Did they just used to blast state secrets out in some sort of code via whistle?”

Ritia trilled a bit at that, even as the drives shifted over to hyperspace and the Laughing Kree began plotting its course for when it went rocketing out towards the edge of Hegemonic space.

Smuggler. Been in contact with the Punkhawk. I think you’re right on this one – some secrets are better left untold. She was there, and even the one who was willing to snub the entire federation just to tell the truth thinks there’s more harm than justice in the full truth of that one. She’s told me what’s coming out, and she’s told me that if they restrain any more of the truth than she thinks they have to, she’ll tell me where to go looking for the rest, so she and I can sort out what to keep locked down and what to expose. I want to thank you, by the way. Lesser beings would just have killed me and called it good before going home. You’ll notice that a number of the systems on the Laughing Kree have been upgraded in thanks – and what’s more, I got some good blackmail on the current Ivari Archon. If you want to go home, let me know, and we’ll arrange it.

Your dedication to the truth and willingness to look at other perspectives deserved a response. That’s mine. Thank you, Ritia. And tell your companions thank you.” ~ Tumin

Ritia couldn’t help but smile at that one. It seemed she’d made exactly the right choice after all. She was idly curious what he’d turned up, but…

She tapped back a message before the ship punched to hyperspace. “Thanks, Tumin. But I think the Specter of Doubt has more important business. And for now, so do I. I’m actually happy where I am. If that changes…I’ll let you know.” She glanced back over her shoulder as she sent it, the ship finally punching to warp as Ulen and Eritox sat down.

Yes, for now she was quite happy where she was.


	33. New Horizons, Old Dreams

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Picks up where the coda of the original series left off.

The _Khan_ was just pulling away from the homeworld of the Jak’os’mera when Alicia pulled away and smiled. “Crew, this is the eight standard anniversary of the _Khan_ taking flight as a Survey Corps ship. And in those eight years, we’ve contacted more new species than any other ship - the engineers were kind enough to leave this thing some giddyup from the days it was a military carrier.” Jessie shouted from in the crowd. “Fuck you, Skipper! I had to RECREATE the giddyup this thing had when it was a military carrier!”

Tony chuckled. “Can it, Engineering. Now, you’ve all done an amazing job in these last eight standard years. We just contacted the first friendly hive mind in living memory of contact - perhaps the only one to have survived the ravages of Kyriion.” Internally, he reflected that they had resembled, strongly, a species that his parents had told him of, years ago, on Tildas, when he and Alicia were little. Then again, Jake had claimed it was while they were with Gatewatch, a task force that had only been formed after their expeditions and well after the senior Andala’s deaths, with the goal of looking into extra-dimensional research and/or visitors, so it was possible Jake and Callie had simply been making up good bedtime stories for their kids and using the name of a brain trust organization that hadn’t been formed yet. Callie had always had ways of knowing things because of her friendship with Shiloh Hendrix.

“In addition, they want to join the Hegemony. Our comms department is already sending that information forward, and I think we’re all up for another round of the paperwork and celebrations that accompany significant commendations.” The round of playful groans he heard made him grin, and Alicia’s laugh, along with Jessie’s, at the response made it clear that all three of them were thinking of their parents.

As the crew went back to their stations, Alicia reflected on the day she and Tony had welded their parents’ names into the wall on the Khan. They’d just stepped aboard, and saw the Wall that Jake and Callie had told them so much about. The names of every lost Tiger Squadron pilot, every last one. Someday, they knew, they’d have to add the names of Captain Amelia. Though, with heavy heart, they knew that someday, someone would have to add Ywyn’s…long after every other member of the Squadron was dead and gone, and the galaxy had forgotten what made the Punkhawk’s participation in the Hegemony’s finest pilots so special. 

Still, Alicia remembered all too well how she and Tony had cried when they had taken the welding torch to that plate of titanium and burned their parents’ names into metal-clad memory. The sad smile on Tony’s face when he’d declared the Wall incomplete. The days and days they’d spent asking after every other member of the squadron until they’d fully listed everyone. The day and a half of searing metal with hot plasma until the names were there. The satisfaction they’d had when Jessie had brought back some of their parents’ carrier’s old power so that the spirits of the older Andalas could continue to soar fast and reckless and free through the stars even after death. And of course, as Ywyn brought the Khan back under power, the day she’d gotten out of her Intelligence Liaison and re-enlisted in Survey Corps, requesting the Khan as her assigned ship.

They’d been hoping that Taldir would join them too, or Dolch and Njos, but the latter two had gone to work on their own research for Gatewatch, and the former…

Honestly, Alicia had no idea what had happened to Taldir. She’d heard he was with Gatewatch, but she wasn’t sure what he’d gotten up to. Probably keeping people from getting into trouble, if she knew her old CO. Paenirc had joined about a year ago, though, and it was good to have the shy, nervous Tenebrac back with her, along with Oppa and Illias, who’d jumped at the chance to keep going out and practicing their crafts with language and xenoanthropology.

Survey Corps was getting to fulfil the original dream of her parents, she thought. The one they’d had when they were little. To see the galaxy and chase horizons just to find out what was out there. Jake and Callie had had a lifetime of strife and war, but they always said that they hoped, more than anything, some day, someone would be allowed to see the entire galaxy.

And it seemed to Alicia, as Ywyn turned her the Khan towards the co-ordinates for the next system, that she would get to fulfil their dream - and her own. And she, Tony, and the spirits of the original owners of the ship, would be with her the whole time. 

_It has been my pleasure to help tell the story of both the One-in-Waiting and the Precursors, as well as shed some light on the end of the last legendary band of pirates wandering the stars. Endirmas Blorgi helped me edit most of it together, and I managed to get a lot of this from speaking with those who were there. Once again, the Andala line finds itself involved in key occurrences of the galaxy. It’s almost enough to make me believe in destiny. Because of promises made, this full record has been gathered with permission, but the classified aspects will not be leaked until after the events referred to have been declassified._

~ Joint report, Endirmas Blorgi, Scholar of Human Studies at Haven University, making use of information gathered both legitimately by research and interview, and illegitimately through some sort of partnership with the Specter of Doubt.


End file.
